Science Friday: Decoding Pneumonia's Defenses | Mimic Octopus | Undersea Ridges Impact Climate Projection | 20 Language Answers

Decoding Pneumonia's Defenses

Researchers sequence more than 200 strains of the bug and find a catalog of ways they evade drugs and vaccines.

Friday, January 28, 2011 | Emily Singer

An in-depth genetic analysis of closely related strains of streptococcus pneumoniae, the bacterium that causes pneumonia, has revealed how the microbe has continually escaped attempts to defeat it. The findings show that the bug can easily swap chunks of DNA with other strains, allowing it to rapidly evolve defenses against both antibiotics and vaccines. Researchers say the findings will help them design more effective preventive measures and treatments.

"It shows just how astonishingly quickly this bug can reinvent itself," says William Hanage, associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard and one of the study's authors. "I think the findings should renew our recognition of exactly how innovative we have to be in finding new ways to combat disease caused by this organism, which is readily capable of throwing off any intervention we direct against it."

Despite antibiotics and a vaccine, the World Health Organization estimates that pneumonia-causing bacteria, known as pneumococcus, is responsible for about four million deaths per year, mostly among children from poor countries.

Researchers sequenced 240 strains of a drug-resistant form of the microbe, collected between 1984 and 2008 from 22 countries around the globe. The original variant, from which the others descended, is thought to have arisen about 40 years ago in response to the introduction of antibiotics. While researchers had previously compared a handful of genes in these microbes, this study was the first to analyze the entire genome, allowing researchers to re-create its evolutionary tree. The findings are published today in the journal Science

[...]

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/32231/

Thaumoctopus mimicus, Mimic Octopus

Description & Behavior

This fascinating creature was discovered in 1998 off the coast of Sulawesi in Indonesia on the bottom of a muddy river mouth. For the next 2 years, scientists filmed nine different mimic octopuses, Thaumoctopus mimicus (Norman & Hochberg, 2005), impersonating sea snakes, lionfish, and flatfish—a strategy used to avoid predators. The mimic octopus reaches about 60 external link cm long, and is typically brown and white striped.

The mimic octopus has been observed shifting between impersonations as it crosses the ocean floor to return to its burrow.

Scientists speculate that additional mimic species will be found in muddy river and estuary bottoms in the tropics as these areas are typically unexplored.

All octopus species are highly intelligent and change the color and texture of their skin for camouflage to avoid predators. Until the mimic octopus was discovered, however, the remarkable ability to impersonate another animal had never been observed.

Norman and fellow researchers, Julian Finn of the University of Tasmania in Australia and Tom Tregenza of the University of Leeds in England, describe the mimic octopus in the [pdf] September 7th issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London.

[...]

http://marinebio.org/species.asp?id=260

---




Underwater Ridges Impact Ocean's Flow of Warm Water; Findings to Improve Climate Models

ScienceDaily (Feb. 4, 2011) — New discoveries on how underwater ridges impact the ocean's circulation system will help improve climate projections.

An underwater ridge can trap the flow of cold, dense water at the bottom of the ocean. Without the ridge, deepwater can flow freely and speed up the ocean circulation pattern, which generally increases the flow of warm surface water.

Warm water on the ocean's surface makes the formation of sea ice difficult. With less ice present to reflect the sun, surface water will absorb more sunlight and continue to warm.

U.S. Geological Survey scientists looked back 3 million years, to the mid-Pliocene warm period, and studied the influence of the North Atlantic Ocean's Greenland-Scotland Ridge on surface water temperature.

"Sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans were much warmer during the mid-Pliocene warm period than they are today, but climate models so far have been unable to fully understand and account for the cause of this large scale of warming," said USGS scientist Marci Robinson. "Our research suggests that a lower height of the Greenland-Scotland Ridge during this geologic age was a contributor to the increase of poleward heat transport."

"This is the first time the impact of a North Atlantic underwater ridge on the ocean circulation system was tested in a mid-Pliocene experiment," said Robinson. "Understanding this process allows for more accurate predictions of factors such as ocean temperature and ice volume changes."

[...]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110203101301.htm

---




20 Things You Didn't Know About... Language

1 The voice box sits lower in the throat in humans than it does in other primates, giving us a uniquely large resonating system. That’s why we alone are able to make the wide range of sounds needed for speech

2 That also explains Mariah Carey, Barry White, and Robin Williams.

3 Unfortunately, the placement of our voice box means we can’t breathe and swallow at the same time, as other animals can (choke).

4 Fortunately, the human voice box doesn’t drop until about 9 months, which allows infants to breathe while nursing.

5 Still the one: Mandarin is the long-standing champ among world languages with 845 million native speakers, about 2.5 times as many as English.

6 But more than 70 percent of all the home pages on the Internet are in English, and more online users speak English than any other language, making it the world’s lingua franca (assuming you consider brb, omg, g2g, and rofl English).

7 Hey, the world will never change—right? English is mandatory for every student in China, starting in third grade. But in America, only 3 percent of elementary schools and 4 percent of secondary schools even offer Chinese.

8 Many science-related English words starting with the letters al—including algebra, alkaline, and algorithm—are derived from Arabic, in which the prefix al just means “the.”

9 This is a legacy of the medieval era, when ancient Greek and Roman knowledge was largely lost in Europe but preserved and advanced among scholars in the Islamic world.

10 Modern technology is making everything smaller, even our words. “Bits of eight” shrank to become byte, “modulate/demodulate” became modem, “picture cell” became pixel, and of course “web log” became blog.

11 At the other end, the longest word recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary is pneumono­ultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, a lung disease caused by inhaling volcanic silicon dust.

[...]

The other nine are at the link

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/nov/20-things-you-didn.t-know-about-language