Mike Drew/Calgary Sun Photo
Mike Drew’s On The Road this week finds our intrepid photog in Val Marie, Saskatchewan with a crew helping these adorable, and endangered, critters.
Gators make biofuel hardcore
Forget shoes or purses, gators could be the next accessory for your car — well, the fuel at least.
As researchers squabble over whether or not conventional biofuel from soybeans, corn and canola is forcing food prices up, a source of biofuel could be lurking in the glades: Alligators.
The reptile’s fat could soon join a ragtag list of alternative ingredients under investigation such as sewage and used deep fryer oil.
According to Rakesh Bajpai and his colleagues, oil drawn from the alligator fat can easily be converted and nearly all of the official standards for high quality biodiesel.
Their report is being published in the American Chemical Society’s journal of Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research.
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It’s still pretty early to say for sure, but driving a car fuelled by alligator does sound pretty cool. Though I wouldn’t want to be responsible for fetching said alligators.
I am BACTERIA … er Batman
Before bacteria exude that nice infectious slime, they “slingshot” about our person.
UCLA researchers were studying twitching motility, or how some species of bacteria move using hair-like appendages called type IV pili, or TFP.
“TFP act like Batman’s grappling hooks,” said Gerard Wong, a professor at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and the California NanoSystems Institute.
“These grappling hooks can extend and bind to a surface and retract and pull the cell along.”
Wong and his team noted the slingshot motion helped propel a pathogen quickly through molasses-like cells.
Wong said he hopes tracking movement patterns of bacteria could help with single-cell diagnostics.
“It gives us the possibility of not just identifying species of bacteria but the possibility of also identifying individual cells. Perhaps in the future, we can look at a cell and try to find the same cell later on the basis of how it moves,” he said in a release.
The study, which focused on Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a pathogen that helps cause deadly infections in cystic fibrosis, will be published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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So does this mean our bodies are a breeding ground for suffering and injustice? /nerd.
Vitamin See
Nerve cells in the retina need Vitamin C to work right, according to a study published in the June 29 issue of Neuroscience. And since the retina is part of the central nervous system, researchers believe the vitamin could have a key role to play in the brain.
“We found that cells in the retina need to be ‘bathed’ in relatively high doses of vitamin C, inside and out, to function properly,” said study co-author Henrique von Gersdorff of the Oregon Health & Science University, adding that since vitamin C is an antioxidant, it might be responsible for preserving receptors and cells.
When retinal cells were deprived of Vitamin C, GABA receptors broke down. GABA clotheslines overexcited neurons to slow them down and some researchers believe it controls anxiety and helps calm us.
“Perhaps the brain is the last place you want to lose vitamin C,” von Gersdorff said, noting the findings may explain why a common symptom of scurvy is depression.
He speculated vitamin C could help protect against glaucoma or epilepsy, which are caused in part because GABA receptors aren’t working right.
“This research provides some important insights and will lead to the generation of new hypotheses and potential treatment strategies,” he said.
Scientists at OHSU used goldfish retinas, which have a similar structure to human ones, to conduct their research.
This food’s fatal
Did my vague title get your attention? Good.
Researchers at the University of New South Wales, Australia, studied how people perceive cues — what grabs our attention and what we let fade into the background. They sussed out two scenarios:
- Predictive: People will react to what they know to be important, like seeing that kid with the peanut allergy make a beeline for a PB&J sandwich.
- Uncertainty: Is it relevant? Or will said kid die if he touches someone who ate a PB&J sandwich?
Notably, researchers found No. 2 was more popular.
“We showed that people will pay more attention to a stimulus or a cue if its status as a predictor is unreliable,” says Oren Griffiths, a research fellow at the university.
Griffiths and his colleagues used an allergist test to study the scenarios. Participants were split into three groups and watched a woman eat an apple. They guessed how it would affect her and learned if she would have either no reaction or would suffer a mild to severe allergy.
If the reaction was near fatal, observers would, obviously, learn the cue fast. But if the reaction was predicted to be mild and instead became severe, learning the new association was slow. This is called the “negative transfer” effect; when people think they know what to expect, they’re not paying as much attention when a new outcome presents itself.
And what about the dreaded mystery apple, the one that could sometimes be safe to eat? Researchers found when the potential allergy was unclear, the later link between apple and severe reaction was learned fast.
“They didn’t know what to expect from the cue, so they had to pay more attention to it,” says Griffiths. “That’s because of the uncertainty principle.”
The study will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science.
Farewell Harley
Calgary lost a legend today.
Business tycoon and sportsman Harley Hotchkiss made many contributions to the community, including his name and years of support to the Hotchkiss Brain Institute at the University of Calgary. The institute’s director, Dr. Samuel Weiss, remembered his friend fondly.
“We were beneficiaries, not just of his tremendous experience and sense of giving, but of the time he now committed to helping build us from the ground up into an organization that the city can be proud of.” — Dr. Samuel Weiss, of benefactor Harley Hotchkiss.
Read more here.
At last! The secret ingredient in Krabby Patty burgers
Spongiforma squarepantsii is a newly discovered mushroom species from the forests of Borneo.
And like its cartoon namesake, the bright orange fungus is shaped like a sea sponge, according to Dennis Desjardin, of San Francisco State University.
Spongiforma squarepantsii. (Photo courtesy Tom Bruns, U.C. Berkeley)
“It’s just like a sponge with these big hollow holes,” he explained in the journal Mycologia. “When it’s wet and moist and fresh, you can wring water out of it and it will spring back to its original size. Most mushrooms don’t do that.”
Desjardins and his colleagues go mushroom hunting around the world, collecting samples of, at times, unidentified species. Researchers estimate there’s between 1.5 and 3 million species in the fungal world and S. squarepantsii is part of the 5% that have a name.
Let’s be CLEAR.
The longer you pause between CPR to give that defibrillator jolt could mean the difference between life and death.
Researchers found the number of people who survive cardiac arrest outside a hospital rises if the pause is less than 10 seconds.
“If your pre-shock pause is over 20 seconds, the chances of surviving to reach a hospital, be treated and be discharged are 53 percent less than if the pause is less than 10 seconds,” said Dr. Sheldon Cheskes, lead author of the study published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.
Researchers found with every five-second increase between CPR and shock, the survival rate drops 18%, but the reverse, going from shock back to CPR, had no significant impact.
Cheskes, who works as medical director for the Sunnybrook Osler Centre for Prehospital Care, said he hopes the findings will motivate paramedics to learn how to use defibs on manual mode to speed up the lifesaving process.
Welcome all, to my little corner of the universe.
I promise to be quick with the introduction. I’ve been a journalist for about eight years and have found myself drawn to the weird, the fascinating and often obtuse world of science.
Sadly, what piques my interest doesn’t always make into the paper or the newscast, so Eureka! A blog is born.
If I do my job right, it won’t matter if you’re a rocket scientist or think dark matter is that stuff between your toes.
The plan is to keep you “in the loop” with news about discoveries, research, scrutiny and general cool stuff stretching from my backyard in Calgary to the far reaches of outer space. (You’ll get a little bit of everything; I’m not going to discriminate.)
If you have any comments, suggestions or concerns, I’m always reachable at ellen.keeble@sunmedia.ca.