Asperger rocks

There was an interesting piece in the guardian last week about an emerging pop musician who was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. Her stage name is Ladyhawke, and she’s from New Zealand. Album released in the UK next week.

Guardian piece

You can check out her music on her MySpace profile too.

space bears

A year ago, researchers sent two species of tardigrades (microscopic animals also known as water-bears) into a low Earth orbit, around 280 km above sea level for 10 days, to see how they cope. Tardigrades are remarkable for their resistance to extreme desiccation, so the idea is that they might be the only animals capable of surviving the high vacuum in space.

Now Ingemar Jönsson et al. from Kristianstad University in Sweden have reported the results of this space mission. It turns out that both species cope with space vacuum very well as long as they are protected from radiation, with survival rates close to 100 %. One species (M.tardigradum) also had a reasonable survival rate after exposure to space vacuum and UV radiation in the UVA and UVB range. Only three specimens of M. tardigradum survived the full unfiltered radiation spectrum typical of Earth orbit.

Tardigrades have now joined bacterial spores and lichens in the very small group of organisms that can survive space conditions. Mechanisms remain to be elucidated, but one may speculate that sophisticated ways of DNA packaging during desiccation and DNA repair afterwards play a role, as has been shown for the radiation resistance of Deinococcus radiodurans.

Current Biology 2008, 18, R729-R731


There’s more about the remarkable stress-resistance of tardigrades in the following chapter from my new book, The birds, the bees, and the platypuses:

Squeezy little bears

The crazy creatures at the extreme ends of life on Earth have fascinated me for many years. As both my PhD thesis and one of my books dealt with life under extreme conditions, I’m no longer that easily impressed by tales of life in boiling water, sizzling deserts, or permanent ice. However, the following story (which unfortunately came up too late for the original edition of “Life on the Edge”) beats them all. If anybody wants to send animals to Mars, I suggest they try the “little bears” or tardigrades. The following text is adapted from a postscript included in the paperback edition of “Life on the Edge.”


Tardigrades are microscopically small animals reminiscent of downsized bears, at most half a millimetre long. They live in water droplets suspended in moss and lichens and can be found on all continents. Now if you’re such a tiny little bear exposed to the elements, you need some very special survivial skills.

Tardigrades have at least two major emergency routines. If their habitat is flooded and there is a risk of oxygen shortage, they inflate to a balloon-like passive state that can float around on the water for days. If, however, the threat comes from a lack of water, they shrink to form the so-called tun state (because it looks like a barrel), which could be described as the animal equivalent of a spore. Researchers have managed to resuscitate tardigrades by rehydrating moss samples after up to 100 years of storage on museum shelves, which proves the quite remarkable long-term stability of this state.

It was this tun state that Kunihiro Seki and Masato Toyoshima (Kanagawa University, Japan) used in their studies of resistance against high pressures. As the presence of water would have converted the animals back to the active state, the researchers suspended the tuns in a perfluorocarbon solvent before they applied pressures of up to 6,000 atmospheres (more than five-fold the pressure found in the deepest trenches of the oceans). While active tardigrade populations in water are are killed off by 2000 atmospheres (already an implausibly high threshold for an animal), the tun state allowed 95 % of the individuals of one species and 80 % of another to survive the maximal pressure of 6,000 atmospheres.

This observation is unprecedented for any animal species. Only some bacterial spores and lichens could hope to compete with that. Still, tardigrade experts may have been only mildly surprised, as they knew already that the tuns can be revived after freezing in liquid helium -- they are frost resistant down to 0.5 Kelvin. Detailed mechanistic explanations for these record-breaking achievements are not yet available. One thing that is known for sure is that the tuns contain high concentrations of the sugar trehalose, which is known to improve the stress resistance of baker’s yeast.

The phenomenal shelf life of the tuns has aroused the interest of researchers in medical technology. Some are trying to copy the tardigrades’ recipe to achieve similar long-term stability for human organs to be used in transplantation.

(2000)


Further reading

M. Gross, Life on the Edge


What happened next

I am pleased to report that researchers actually followed up on my suggestion and sent tardigrades to space. The TARDIS (Tardigrades in Space) experiment was part of the FOTON M-3 mission, that launched on 14 September 2007 and returned safely on the 26th, after 189 orbits. At the time of writing, the tardigrade passengers were awaiting detailed analyses that will surely reveal how well they are suited to withstand space conditions.
http://tardigradesinspace.blogspot.com/

periodic table of videos

I only found out yesterday that there is a "periodic table of videos", where each of the currently known 117 elements has its own little clip. You just click on the relevant square in the periodic table and you get the 3-minute introduction to the element. Genius. The structure of the clips I've seen is quite elementary as well, though. Basically they cut back and forth between Professor Martyn Poliakoff sitting behind his desk with a periodic-table themed tie (and matching mug), waving his hands and explaining the more academic side of the topic, and a younger scientist in the lab doing something with the element in question and giving additional explanations.

So maybe I wouldn't want to sacrifice five hours to sit through all 117 elements, but it's well worth checking out a few.

PS People in the UK may recognise the name Poliakoff -- his brother Stephen has written lots of stuff for stage and TV.

blue as a smurf

Malaysian frogs of the species Polypedates leucomystax protect their spawn by secreting a protective liquid and whipping it up to a foam which turns blue after a while. Researchers have now identified the cause of this colour as a highly unusual protein which they named after the similarly coloured cartoon heroes: ranasmurfin (where rana is latin for frog).

Ranasmurfin crystallizes so nicely (forming deep blue crystals) that the researchers didn’t even need to solve the sequence to figure out what they were looking at. They found a novel fold (very rare these days) and a novel cross-link between the two subunits, namely an indophenol group which has never before been observed in a stable protein structure. This group is also the source of the characteristic blue colour. Much like the chromophore in Green Fluorescent Protein, it arises from a chemical reaction between amino acids of the protein chain that occurs after the synthesis is finished. Thus one would not have been able to predict this feature from sequencing the gene.

Unusual Chromophore and Cross-Links in Ranasmurfin: A Blue Protein from the Foam Nests of a Tropical Frog
Muse Oke, Rosalind Tan Yan Ching, Lester G. Carter, Kenneth A. Johnson, Huanting Liu, Stephen A. McMahon, Malcolm F. White, Carlos Bloch Jr., Catherine H. Botting, Martin A. Walsh, Aishah A. Latiff, Malcolm W. Kennedy, Alan Cooper, James H. Naismith
Angewandte Chemie International Edition
DOI: 10.1002/anie.200802901

children of latin america

Webcast: The Children of Latin American: A Future Without Poverty

On September 24th, The Earth Institute at Columbia University and América Latina en Acción Solidaria (ALAS) present "The Children of Latin America: A Future Without Poverty. Creating equity through early childhood development programs". World leaders from Mexico, Argentina, El Salvador and Panama join Jeffrey D. Sachs and Shakira to discuss the importance of comprehensive early childhood development in Latin America.

The event will be streamed live on Alas Foundation Website

To see the event, simply register on Alas' website.

Participants -- Latin American Leaders:

Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa, President, Republic of Mexico
Cristina Elisabet Fernández de Kirchner, President, Argentine Republic
Elias Antonio Saca González, President, Republic of El Salvador
Martín Erasto Torrijos Espino, President, Republic of Panama

Participants -- Experts and Activists:

Shakira, Advocate, ALAS
Alejandro Sanz, Advocate, ALAS
James J. Heckman, Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, University of Chicago
Luis Alberto Moreno, President, Inter-American Development Bank
Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director, The Earth Institute at Columbia University
Alejandro Santo Domingo Dávila, President, ALAS Board

a place in the sun

Germany's Max Planck society seeks to expand its operations around the globe and has now secured funding for its first institute in the US, due to open in Palm Beach County, Florida, next year. Read my story in today's issue of Current Biology (limited access).

Of course, all envious university employees who have always thought that Max Planck people were enjoying a place on the sunny side of life, won't change their mind based on this piece of news ...

activist to fructivist

you know it's harvest time when George Monbiot, who regularly implores us to save the world, goes all domestic and fruity and raves about old-fashioned apple varieties. I broadly agree with him on this fructivist manifesto, but have two moans. firstly, no quinces in his orchard ? and secondly, how could he move from Oxford to the middle of nowhere, sorry , middle of Wales? I'm wondering whether the allotment he left behind will get a blue plaque one day. "George Monbiot planted these carefully chosen apple trees before retiring to Wales."

when computers were female

Timed to coincide with google's 10th birthday, Nature is running a special issue with lots of pieces on "big data" this week. One thing that I found particularly intriguing, and that was completely new to me, is the story of the women hired as data crunchers between the middle of the 19th and the middle of the 20th century, who were referred to as "computers", as described by Sue Nelson on page 36 of the issue.

There's a wonderful quote in this paragraph of the essay:

In 1901, William Elkin, the director of Yale Observatory, expressed a view typical of the time as to who was best suited for this work. "I am thoroughly in favour of employing women as measurers and computers," he said. "Not only are women available at smaller salaries than are men, but for routine work they have important advantages. Men are more likely to grow impatient after the novelty of the work has worn off and would be harder to retain for that reason."

Even though the computers' work was mainly dull routine, the author also cites examples of women who made original contributions and built successful scientific careers on this occupation.

Full text is here, and appears to be open access.

Full reference:
Big data: The Harvard computers p36
The first mass data crunchers were people, not machines. Sue Nelson looks at the discoveries and legacy of the remarkable women of Harvard's Observatory.
Sue Nelson
doi:10.1038/455036a

oddest title ever

... and the Diagram of Diagrams, i.e. the award for the oddest title ever (or at least in the last 30 years) goes to:

Greek Rural Postmen and their Cancellation Numbers.

published by the Greek Hellenic Philatelic Society of Great Britain, which "exists to encourage the collection of Greek stamps and to promote their study".

source

In celebration, the Guardian has put up a gallery of 30 odd titles.

Glad to see none of my weird books was picked. It's always a question of perspective, I guess. Most of the authors concerned probably considered their title perfectly reasonable.

magnetic liquids

In Angewandte Chem. early view, there is a nice little paper reporting the first ionic liquid that is both magnetic and fluorescent. So one could have a drop of it in tube, with another, immiscible liquid, and move it around with magnetic field, and watch it glow. And once that becomes boring, I am almost sure there is a brilliant application for this just waiting to be discovered. Just need to find my thinking hat and put it on ...

Hm, how about some new display technology. A new kind of lava lamp. Or for spooky floating aquarium lighting? Still looking for that hat!

Dysprosium Room-Temperature Ionic Liquids with Strong Luminescence and Response to Magnetic Fields
Bert Mallick, Benjamin Balke, Claudia Felser, Anja-Verena Mudring
Published Online: Aug 29 2008 6:45AM
DOI: 10.1002/anie.200802390

more couscous

I found a slide show with pix of Hafsia Herzi, the star of the recent movie Couscous (La graine et le mulet), so without further ado I'll embed it here:

van Gogh's ear

I'm pleased to report that Spanish band La Oreja de Van Gogh appear to have survived the departure of their singer, Amaia Montero. The new album A las cinco en el astoria, recorded with a brand new singer, is available in Spain from today, and in the rest of the world from Sept. 30th.