Say you're a marine biologist and you want to study the little bitty creatures of the sea — shrimps and worms and things like that. How do you go about capturing them?

Why, with an underwater vacuum, of course.

At the PNAS First Look blog, David Harris writes that this "SCUBA-tank powered vacuum, called an “airlift,” inhales shrimp, sand fleas, marine worms, and 'things that would swim away if they had the chance.'"

"The earliest sawfishes likely arose in the shallow Tethys Sea, that ocean surrounded by the ancient continents of Godwanda and Laurasia, during the Cretaceous period at least 60 million years ago," writes Dr. M. at Deep Sea News.

These "sole survivors of an ancient bloodline" now number only seven species which roam the muddy bottoms of coastal areas, bays and estuaries. 

All sawfishes can move easily between fresh and saltwater and often venture deep upstream into rivers. The sawfish lifestyle puts this both their size and saw near humans.  All seven species are considered critically endangered by the IUCN.  As much as we have impacted them, sawfish have also greatly influenced our culture.

And now, they're one of the most threatened species on our planet. Thanks, humans!

More: Exaltation to Extinction for Sawfishes [Deep Sea News]]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/02/19/an-appreciation-of-the-sawfish.html/feed 6 http://boingboing.net/2013/02/19/resurrecting-the-dead.html http://boingboing.net/2013/02/19/resurrecting-the-dead.html#comments Tue, 19 Feb 2013 17:58:50 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=214006 the paleophysiologists who are reconstructing the proteins of extinct animals using fragments of DNA found in long-dead remains. Those proteins, simple as they may seem, hold some amazing stories. For instance, reconstructed haemoglobin from wooly mammoths could someday help doctors get oxygen to the brains of high-risk human surgery patients.]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/02/19/resurrecting-the-dead.html/feed 2 http://boingboing.net/2013/02/06/why-your-mixer-matters.html http://boingboing.net/2013/02/06/why-your-mixer-matters.html#comments Wed, 06 Feb 2013 17:34:52 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=211340 your choice of mixer could be the difference between a blood alcohol level that is within legal limits and one that is most decidedly not. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/02/06/why-your-mixer-matters.html/feed 14 http://boingboing.net/2013/02/05/what-does-the-world-look-like.html http://boingboing.net/2013/02/05/what-does-the-world-look-like.html#comments Tue, 05 Feb 2013 17:58:56 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=210985

On the left is a picture of me with my bike, taken by my friend Laura Kling. On the right is the same image, as it would be seen by a person with protanopia — a relatively common (as in, still very rare) form of color blindness that affects the ability to see green, yellow, and red colors.

The Color Blindness Simulator will allow you to do this with your own photos.

One of my favorite ad tropes is the Body=Machine/Body=Factory idea, because the imagery is often more detailed and also more hilarious than in most ads. As a kid I used to LOVE any illustrations of the body that depicted tiny workers inside, such as The Human Body, for example. :D This link to a book about Fritz Kahn's Der Mensch als Industriepalast is also fascinating (although not advertisement). Brief video version of that book HERE (well worth 3 minutes of your time.) This series of articles and illustrations in the same vein (XD) appeared in the Berliner Morgenpost in 1931 and is simply breathtaking.

Body = Machine: A Series ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/23/ads-that-depict-the-human-body.html/feed 12 http://boingboing.net/2013/01/17/utensils-probably-gave-us-all.html http://boingboing.net/2013/01/17/utensils-probably-gave-us-all.html#comments Thu, 17 Jan 2013 21:18:24 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=206410 In Europe, for instance, evidence suggests that humans have only had an overbite for about 250 years. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/17/utensils-probably-gave-us-all.html/feed 36 http://boingboing.net/2013/01/11/man-vs-duck-or-a-bunch-of-li.html http://boingboing.net/2013/01/11/man-vs-duck-or-a-bunch-of-li.html#comments Fri, 11 Jan 2013 18:21:49 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=205239 But science has the answer. (Via Tim Maly and kottke)]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/11/man-vs-duck-or-a-bunch-of-li.html/feed 12 http://boingboing.net/2012/12/18/the-medical-implications-of-sp.html http://boingboing.net/2012/12/18/the-medical-implications-of-sp.html#comments Tue, 18 Dec 2012 17:48:10 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=201253 This article from the British Medical Journal should give aspiring space tourists some food for thought. The basic gist: Traveling into the heavens is not really comparable, physically and medically, to Earth-bound travel. In fact, up until now, extreme physical fitness has been a major factor in how we select space travelers. What happens when less-fit people start flying? What happens to sick people? These are questions that matter a lot, given the fact that current astronauts report everything from reduced eyesight to potentially dangerous immune system changes. (Via The Inkfish blog)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/12/18/the-medical-implications-of-sp.html/feed 13 http://boingboing.net/2012/12/07/open-science-event-in-london-t.html http://boingboing.net/2012/12/07/open-science-event-in-london-t.html#comments Fri, 07 Dec 2012 22:13:36 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=199150 the Wellcome Trust is sponsoring a two-day bioscience hackathon with prizes awarded for the best ideas in four categories: Open Me — collecting data on yourself and making it useful to yourself; Open Research — making biomedical data produced by professional scientists more accessible and useful to everybody; Open Data — creating apps and hardware that allow doctors to better follow what's really happening with their patients; and the idea that is most useful to the public at large. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/12/07/open-science-event-in-london-t.html/feed 0 http://boingboing.net/2012/12/05/iron-egghead-explain-biology.html http://boingboing.net/2012/12/05/iron-egghead-explain-biology.html#comments Wed, 05 Dec 2012 20:37:04 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=198585

Scientific American has an awesome contest going on right now. They're challenging you to make a video explaining some part, process, or system in the human body using eight objects: Yourself, a writing surface, a writing implement, rubber bands, paper clips, string, cups , and balls. You have to use all eight items. You can't use anything else.

You can read the full instructions and rules online. And check out the sample video, made by Scientific American interns Isha Soni and Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato.

Bonus: The first 100 qualified entries all get a free digital subscription to Sci Am.

Via Bora Zivkovik

Last week, an American and a Russian — Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko — were selected to spend a year living continuously in space, aboard the International Space Station. Only four other people have done this before. All them were Russian, so Scott Kelly is going to break the American record for time spent in space.

The mission won't start until 2015, and it's part of a much longer term goal — sending people to Mars. We know that spending time in space does take a toll on the human body. For instance, hanging out without gravity means you aren't using your muscles, even the ones that you'd use to support your own weight on Earth. Without use, muscles deteriorate over time. Bone density also drops. Basically, after a few months in space, astronauts return to Earth as weak as little kittens. Which is, to say the least, a less than ideal situation for any future Mars explorers.

Having Kelly and Kornienko stay up for a year will give scientists more data on what happens to the human body in space, give them a chance to test out preventative treatments that could keep astronauts stronger, and allows them to see how the amount of time spent in space affects the amount of time it takes to physically recover from the trip. As an extra research bonus, Kelly is the identical twin brother of Mark Kelly, the astronaut married to former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Which means that there will be a built-in control to compare Kelly to when he comes back from his mission.

In honor of that upcoming experiment, here's an old video that will give you an idea of what we knew (and didn't know) back at the dawn of the space age. Science in Action was a TV show produced by the California Academy of Sciences. In this 1956 episode, they explore the then-still-theoretical physiology of space travel ... with a special guest appearance by Chuck Yeager!

Wikipedia page on the effects of space travel on the human body

Science in Action: Aero Medicine — Part 1 and Part 2 at the Prelinger Archives.

Imagine an apatosaurus with a long, elephant-like snout. Plenty of people have. That's because the nostril placement on sauropod dinosaurs is, in some ways, remarkably similar to that of trunked animals that live today. In both cases, the nostrils are large, and they're located up around what we'd call the forehead, kind of smack between the eyes.

On the one hand, this is one of those things that it's really hard to ever know for certain. We don't have preserved soft tissue, so when we make models of what dinosaurs might have looked like we're really going on clues from the bones and comparisons to living animals with similar bone structure. Because of that, it is somewhat reasonable to suggest that hey, maybe, sauropods really did look like grumpy diplodocus in the image above. It's fun to speculate.

But not all speculations are created equal. In a fascinating post at the Tetrapod Zoology blog, Darren Naish explains why a superficial similarity to trunked animals isn't enough to counteract the much-more prevalent evidence against sauropod trunks. One of the more interesting lines of evidence he points out is the fact that dinosaurs apparently lacked the facial which form the trunk in living animals. We know this partly because muscles leave their signature on bone, and Naish says there's no evidence sauropods had the right facial muscles. It's further bolstered by the fact that the animals most closely related to sauropods don't have those facial muscles, either.

Naish's piece reminds me of the last time we talked about sauropod biology here. That, too, dealt with the fact that superficial similarities aren't enough to infer that two animals must have identical biology. Only, in that case, we were talking about the differences between the long necks of giraffes and the long necks of sauropods.

Here's a big difference between nature and a natural history museum: In the wild, when you find a skeleton of anything, it's seldom arranged in a neat, orderly, anatomically correct manner. Even if an animal dies in captivity, nature won't just conveniently produce a skeleton suitable for mounting.

So how do museums get the perfect skeletal specimens that you see behind glass?

The answer: Lots and lots and lots of tedious work. Plus the assistance of a few thousand flesh-eating bugs.

This video from the University of Michigan traces the creation of a bat skeleton, from a fleshy dead bat in a jar, to a neat, little set of bones in a display case. It's painstaking (and moderately disgusting) work. Sort of like building model cars, if the Ford Mustang had realistic organ tissue.

This hummingbird is sleeping in a specialized research container connected to a machine that measures how much oxygen it is breathing. According to forrestertr7, who posted the video to YouTube, this experiment was part of research aimed at understanding the differences between the metabolism of hummingbirds and that of larger species. After its nap, the hummingbird was released back into the wild.

But what about the snoring? Does the hummingbird really need a tiny, little beak strip, or what? I asked science blogger Joe Hanson, who posted this video to Twitter earlier today, and he did some research. Turns out, it's not totally unreasonable to call that adorable little wheeze a "snore". But, at the same time, hummingbirds have very different biology than we do. A snore for them isn't the same as a snore for us.

Hummingbirds have incredibly high metabolic needs. To do all that buzzing around and to keep their tiny bodies warm, they eat the human equivalent of a refrigerator full of food every day, mostly in the form of high-energy nectar and fatty bugs. Because of their small size, they also lose a lot of body heat to the air. In order to preserve energy on cool nights, they have the ability to enter a daily, miniature hibernation called torpor.

...Just before morning, their natural circadian rhythms kick in and they start to thaw out, like heating a car engine on a cold day. What we see in the video is probably a bird coming out of torpor (which is what the scientists in the video were studying), starting to breathe in more oxygen to raise its body temperature, and making that adorable snoring noise.

Read the full story at Joe Hanson's blog, It's Okay To Be Smart

HCG is a pregnancy hormone. It's produced by the placenta, a temporary organ that only forms in female bodies when an embryo has attached to the uterine lining. And so it was kind of weird when a male friend of a Reddit user known as CappnPoopDeck peed on a home pregnancy test and it came back positive.

Turns out, HCG can show up in men, too. And when it does, bad things are happening. You might have seen this story on Gawker earlier this week, but the science behind it is so crazy that I wanted to discuss it in a little more depth.

First, let's talk about HGC in ladies. The specific cells that produce HCG are called trophoblasts. At the point where a human is quite literally nothing more than a ball of 70-100 cells, trophoblasts form the outer layer. The mochi to our ice cream center, if you will. These cells eventually grow into the placenta, but at the earliest stages of pregnancy, their primary function is to rip through flesh and secure the embryo to uterine wall. Seriously.

I'm going to quote from Jon Cohen's excellent book on miscarriage, Coming to Term, because it has heavily influenced the mental pictures I see when I think "trophoblast".

Successful implantation occurs only if the embryo properly "invades" the lining of the uterus, which requires that the placenta's trophoblast cells penetrate deeply, boring into maternal arteries to shunt blood to the growing baby. If the mother did not stop the trophoblasts' drilling, they might burrow so deeply into her uterus that she could hemorrhage and die. [He goes on to explain how the female body prevents this. Although he notes that, sometimes, it doesn't work.]

Fun!

The outermost cells in a layer of trophoblasts are called syncytiotrophoblasts. These are the cells that actually produce HCG, which plays a huge role in making sure that you actually miss that first missed period. The chain of command works like this: When you ovulate, you release an egg from a follicle on your ovary. But that follicle doesn't just instantly disappear afterwards. Instead, it hangs out, producing progesterone — a chemical that is instrumental in preventing you from shedding your uterine lining and having a period.

On a normal, non-pregnant cycle, progesterone levels will go up for a bit, but then the spent follicle — the corpus luteum — will wither away. Your progesterone levels will drop. And you'll ride the crimson wave.

But, if you're pregnant, the corpus luteum doesn't go away. It keeps on producing progesterone, and no period happens. What keeps the corpus luteum alive and kicking? Human chorionic gonadotropin, that's what.

So why on Earth would HCG end up in a man?

When that pregnancy test came back positive, CappnPoopDeck made a rage comic about it, and posted it to Reddit. The very first response, from a user named goxilo, was this: "If this is true, you should check yourself for testicular cancer. Seriously. Google it."

Yes, HCG in men can be a sign of a rare (and dangerous) form of testicular cancer — choriocarcinoma. This is a cancer made up of syncytiotroblastic cells, said Katherine McGlynn, a senior investigator with the National Cancer Institutes. The tumor secretes HCG because that's what syncytiotroblasts do. They secrete HCG. And they don't particularly care whether they're secreting it into a man or a woman.

But how do they get into a guy, to begin with? That's where things get really weird. The truth is that nobody is entirely certain, McGlynn told me. But there are a couple of theories. One possibility is that these syncytiotroblasts that turn cancerous were leftovers — remnants of the time when that guy was just a ball of 70-100 cells. One way or another, they persisted in his body and then started to grow out of control.

The other theory: Somehow, normal cells in the man's testes just start regressing, reverting to one of the earliest forms of cells in a human's life cycle. Either way, one thing is certain, "It's exactly the same cell as in the placenta," McGlynn said.

The bad news: Choriocarcinomas move really fast. They're more common in men under 30 and the prognosis is usually bad, because most of the time nobody catches them until they've already spread to other parts of the body, especially the lungs. In that, CappnPoopDeck's friend is incredibly lucky. Both that he decided to pee on a stick for LULZ and that his friend posted the news to Reddit. In a follow-up, CappnPoopDeck reported that doctors found a very small tumor in his friend's right testicle. But they found it early enough that it's going to make treatment much easier.

The good news: Men should know that their chances of developing a choriocarcinoma are extremely rare. A 2002 paper in the Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine reported that only about 2 men in 100,000 will get any kind of testicular cancer. Pure choriocarcinomas — the dangerous kind that I'm talking about here — make up less than 1% of those diagnoses. It's not clear whether CappnPoopDeck's friend has a pure choriocarcinoma, or a much-less-deadly form of testicular cancer that happens to incorporate some syncytiotrophoblasts.

Either way, McGlynn wanted to make it clear that you all shouldn't feel like you need to run out and stock up on home pregnancy tests. In fact, at least twice during our interview, she marveled at how amazing it was that this story even happened. "The actual odds of the man having this particular cancer, and then using a pregnancy test, are sky high. It's kind of amazing that this happened," she said.

Read More:
• Read the Gawker story about this case
• Read the original Reddit thread
• Read a history of home pregnancy tests, which includes a lot of information about HCG
• Read a full research paper about a different case of testicular choriocarcinoma

Photo: Shutterstock]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/11/08/positive-pregnancy-test-diagno.html/feed 52 http://boingboing.net/2012/11/01/pssst-hey-kid-wanna-see-some.html http://boingboing.net/2012/11/01/pssst-hey-kid-wanna-see-some.html#comments Thu, 01 Nov 2012 20:45:58 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=191647

Come on. It's for science.

In fact, it's meant to help people.

Researchers at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, put a dead pig in a shark-proof (and octopus-proof, as you'll see) cage and stuck it in the ocean in order to learn more about how human remains decompose underwater. That knowledge will help forensic scientists interpret crime scenes.

Most of the work is done by maggots known as sea lice, but towards the end, after the maggots have eaten the good bits, you can watch some fat, red shrimp move in to pick apart the cartilage.

Read the full story about this research at New Scientist

Proteins are made up of chains of amino acids, folded and twisted in on themselves to make incredibly complex shapes.

The human brain, it has been said, is kind of a pattern-finding machine — prone to spotting faces on the moon, fat bunnies in the clouds, and Jesus on slices of toast.

When the two meet, you get Protein Art. May K., a Russian-born artist who lives in Germany, takes actual protein structures, sees the other things those structures seem to look an awful lot like, and then draws cartoons based on the resulting apophenia.

For instance, take a look at the protein structure above. After the jump, you can see the picture that May K. saw in its folds.

Bonus: The protein pictured actually comes from a dromedary camel. May K. writes:

This small protein is called nanobody. Sounds cool, but what is a nanobody? It is a fragment of an antibody, in this case an antibody from a camel. Antibodies serve our immune system, they can bind pathogenic substances and protect our body from dangerous invaders. Antibodies are widely used in medicine and biology, e.g for passive immunization or targeting of substances (mostly proteins) of interest. In both fields nanobodies have their advantages. They are stabler and much smaller than conventional antibodies and can pass narrow holes. So literally, for this nanobody camel it is easy to go through the eye of a needle.

Read more at May K.'s Live Journal, where her protein art is collected

1) For frak’s sake, DRY OUT YOUR SOCKS. Put them over the fan over night so that you have 5 precious, precious moments of dryness before stepping out that door into the rain again…

2) Air everything out. For real. I mean everything. If you have electricity, lay in front of a fan in the buff for at least two hours every evening. You think I’m joking… but:

3) When your feet start to bleed - and boy, will they ever - don’t panic. The hole that appears to be eating its way into the space between your 4th and 5th toes on your right foot won’t go any deeper than a full centimeter (you know this because you stuck your finger inside of it and then measured the extent of the bloody seepage on your pinkie finger… the hole is that wide and deep).

4) Ditch the hat. Ditch the hat. Ditch the - oh. Now it’s on your scalp.

It gets worse.

Things I Learned as a Field Biologist #639 (via JWZ)

(Image: Fungi, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from dmclear's photostream) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/10/25/field-biologist-describes-horr.html/feed 29 http://boingboing.net/2012/10/18/genetically-modified-mouse-to.html http://boingboing.net/2012/10/18/genetically-modified-mouse-to.html#comments Thu, 18 Oct 2012 16:50:49 +0000 David Pescovitz http://boingboing.net/?p=188278

The MouSensor is a lab mouse genetically-engineered to sniff out land mines. Mice have already been trained to find explosives by scent but according to Hunter College biologist Charlotte D'Hulst, the MouSensor is ultra sensitive to the odor of TNT. From The Guardian:

Given its extreme sensitivity to TNT, the mouse would probably have some sort of seizure when it sniffed explosives, said D'Hulst, because so many neurons in its olfactory bulb would be firing at once. And that seizure might be detectable by some device implanted into the mouse.

"We are thinking along the lines of implanting a chip under the skin of these animals that would wirelessly report back to a computer when the animal's behaviour is changing upon being triggered by a TNT landmine," said D'Hulst. Once the location of a landmine had been identified, a bomb-disposal expert could go in and neutralise it in the normal way. The mouse itself would be safe from the landmine, since it would be too small to trigger an explosion.

"GM mouse created to detect landmines"]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/10/18/genetically-modified-mouse-to.html/feed 11 http://boingboing.net/2012/10/11/new-study-suggests-arsenic-l.html http://boingboing.net/2012/10/11/new-study-suggests-arsenic-l.html#comments Thu, 11 Oct 2012 18:31:30 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=186766

Remember arsenic life? In 2010 NASA researchers thought they'd found evidence that certain bacteria could use arsenic in their DNA where all other forms of life on Earth use phosphate. Then it turned out their research was really flawed. Then it turned out they were wrong. In general, there was a to-do.

Fast forward to this month, when scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel published a study in which they were trying to figure out how bacteria can tell the difference between phosphate and arsenate and "know" to prefer the phosphate. They used phosphate-collecting proteins from four different species of bacteria in their research, including the one that had been at the center of the arsenic life controversy. And along the way, they discovered a fun twist to that story.

This new study suggests that "arsenic life" bacteria is, indeed, able to survive in arsenate-heavy solutions where other bacteria fail. But, the Weizmann researchers say their data shows that success isn't due to a preference for arsenic, or even an ability to use it. Instead, "arsenic life" is probably just much, much, much, much better at collecting and using every tiny trace of phosphate it can get its metaphorical paws on.

The researchers looked at five types of phosphate-binding protein — which bind phosphate in a molecular pathway that brings it into the cells — from four species of bacteria. Two of the bacterial species were sensitive to arsenate and two were resistant to it. To test how effective these proteins were at discriminating between phosphate and arsenate, the researchers put them in solution with a set amount of phosphate and different concentrations of arsenate for 24 hours, and then checked which of the molecules the proteins would bind to.

Their threshold for when ‘discrimination’ broke down was when 50% of the proteins ended up bound to arsenate — indicating that the ability to discriminate had been overwhelmed. Even in solutions containing 500-fold more arsenate than phosphate, all five proteins were still able to preferentially bind phosphate. And one protein, from the Mono Lake bacterium, could do so at arsenate excesses of up to 4,500-fold over phosphate.

... The latest paper shows that the “arsenic monster” GFAJ-1 goes to a huge amount of effort, “even more than other life”, to avoid arsenate, says Wolfgang Nitschke from the Mediterranean Institute of Microbiology in Marseilles, France, who co-authored a commentary questioning the conclusion that GFAJ-1 could replace phosphate with arsenate.

Read the rest of the story at Nature News

Image: Mono Lake with Tufa Towers at Sunrise 16Oct2011., a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from mikebaird's photostream