The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

To cure my wife, you want to transplant my *what*?

New York Times gets to the fundamentals of the strange world of microbes-as-medicine:

“She was just dwindling down the drain, and she probably would have died,” Dr. [Alexander] Khoruts [of the University of Minnesota] said.

Dr. Khoruts decided his patient needed a transplant. But he didn’t give her a piece of someone else’s intestines, or a stomach, or any other organ. Instead, he gave her some of her husband’s bacteria.

Dr. Khoruts mixed a small sample of her husband’s stool with saline solution and delivered it into her colon. Writing in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology last month, Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues reported that her diarrhea vanished in a day. Her Clostridium difficile infection disappeared as well and has not returned since.

The procedure — known as bacteriotherapy or fecal transplantation — had been carried out a few times over the past few decades.

Entered on 15 July 2010 at 6:12 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Super squid penis. (No, this is not spam.)

BBC recently covered the salacious details when scientists discovered a squid’s enormous sexual organ:

The male squid’s sexual organ is almost as long as its whole body, including the squid’s mantle, head and arms.

That shows how male deep-sea squid inseminate females; they use their huge penis to shoot out packages of sperm, injecting them into the female’s body.

The discovery may also help explain how giant squid mate in the ocean depths.

…

“When the mantle of the squid was opened for maturity assessment, we witnessed an unusual event,” [says Dr Alexander Arkhipkin of the Falkland Islands Government Fisheries Department.]

“The penis of the squid, which had extended only slightly over the mantle margin, suddenly started to erect, and elongated quickly to 67cm total length, almost the same length as the whole animal.”

Picture at the link. You pervert.

Entered on 14 July 2010 at 6:18 in the Science file | 1 Observation |  Print

Prozac pollution and shrimp suicide.

BBC News reports that antidepressant runoff is encouraging shrimp to go toward the white light:

The researchers say this causes the shrimps to forget to hide from predators and, as a result, find themselves getting eaten.

Video at the link.

Entered on 13 July 2010 at 6:14 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Humans: warming the globe for 15,000 years.

New Scientist steals my innocent view of humankind before the Industrial Revolution. It turns out we were probably messing up the climate in the Ice Age, too:

Last year, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studied fossil pollen and spores of a dung fungus found in sediment cores drilled from a North American lakebed and established that the decline in megafauna populations preceded the change in vegetation.

…

“There is a strong connection between when humans arrived, when mammoths went extinct and when you see this big increase in vegetation,” says [Christopher Doughty of the Carnegie Institution of Science in Stanford, California]. “They overlap almost exactly.”

If humans played a role in the extinction of the mammoths, then they had a hand in the climate change that followed. “I see it as humans’ first big impact on the planet,” says Doughty.

Entered on 12 July 2010 at 6:03 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science Art: Giovanni de Dondi’s Astrarium, 1364.

This is a modern tracing
of a 1461 illustration
of a 1364 drawing
of a mechanical clock
that represented the movement of the universe.

Entered on 11 July 2010 at 6:44 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Leonardo da Vinci: Paleontologist.

Smithsonian reveals yet another secret talent from the original Renaissance man. He was a forefather of fossil science:

In a new paper in the journal Palaios, Andrea Baucon shows that he was a pioneer in the study of both “body fossils,” or the remains of once-living organisms, and of “trace fossils,” such as the footprints, burrows and coprolites organisms left behind.

During da Vinci’s lifetime, most people saw fossils not as the remains of creatures that had lived long ago, but as the products of forces inside the earth that were trying to reproduce life within rock, constantly generating the stone “shells” and dark “shark teeth” found many miles from the nearest ocean. But da Vinci thought differently: as Baucon points out, his private notes in the Codex Leicester show that he had figured out that the fossils of the Italian countryside had once been creatures that lived in an ancient sea. His insights into the origin and nature of body fossils anticipated what the naturalist Nicolaus Steno would explain in the mid-17th century.

Entered on 9 July 2010 at 6:57 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Addicted to heartbreak

The same circuit that controls your jonesin’ for just one more is also, the American Physiological Society says, in charge of your heartbreak:

The pain and anguish of rejection by a romantic partner may be the result of activity in parts of the brain associated with motivation, reward and addiction cravings, according to a study published in the July issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology (http://jn.physiology.org/).

The study’s findings could have implications for understanding why feelings related to romantic rejection can be hard to control, and may provide insight into extreme behaviors associated with rejection, such as stalking, homicide and suicide—behaviors that occur across many cultures throughout the world.

…

In the study, researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record brain activity in 15 college-age, heterosexual men and women who had recently been rejected by their partners but reported that they were still intensely “in love.” The average length of time since the initial rejection and the participants’ enrollment in the study was 63 days, and all participants scored high on a psychological test called the Passionate Love Scale, which determines the intensity of romantic feelings. All participants said they spent more than 85% of their waking hours thinking of the person who rejected them, they yearned for the person to return and they wanted to get back together.

[via.]

Entered on 8 July 2010 at 6:11 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

We’re gonna need a bigger boat. MUCH bigger.

Fossil-hunters have found the remains of a creature they’re calling Melville’s Leviathan, AP reports. It’s a whale that, 12 million years ago, snacked on humpbacks the way orcas eat seals:

The prehistoric sperm whale grew to between 13 and 18 meters (up to 60 feet) long, not unusual by today’s standards. But unlike modern sperm whales, Leviathan melvillei, named for Herman Melville, sported vicious, tusk-like teeth some 36 centimeters (14 inches) long.

The ancient beast evidently dined on other whales, researchers said in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature. They report finding a skull of the beast in a Peruvian desert.

The researchers named it in tribute to the 19th-century author and his classic tale of the great white whale, which includes frequent digressions on natural history that punctuate the action.

“There is a chapter about fossils,” one of the paper’s authors, Olivier Lambert of the Natural History Museum in Paris, said. “Melville even mentions some of the fossils that I studied for my PhD thesis.”

There’s an illustration at the link.

Entered on 6 July 2010 at 20:48 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Song of the God Particle.

The BBC has a simulation of the sound of the Higgs boson.

That’s what the harmonics of the mass-bearing subatomic particle will sound like if one really does turn up at the Large Hadron Collider. That’s what matter sounded like when it was coming into being.

Entered on 6 July 2010 at 15:55 in the Science file | Care to make an observation? |  Print

Science Art: Venice, Italy, by Landsat 7, 2001.

^{Click to embiggen vastly}

Funny how Venice itself looks like Venetian glass from far enough away, ain’t it?

From NASA’s Landsat 7 archive.

Happy birthday, America – named for Amerigo Vespucci, who was from Florence, but loved Venice enough to name Venezuela after it.

Entered on 4 July 2010 at 6:10 in the Science Art file | Care to make an observation? |  Print