Wetware is Real

For years now, scientists have been “mucking” about inside monkey brains explains Graham Morehead in his latest post, Wetware is Real:

They put electrodes in there to learn about simian muscle control. More recently researchers at theUniversity of Pittsburgh Motorlab gave a monkey the ability to control a disembodied robotic arm. A monkey was restrained in a chair (arms stuck in tubes). A set of electrodes had been surgically implanted into the part of its brain that controls arm and hand movement. The monkey was able to control the robot arm with sufficient dexterity to feed himself marshmallows. Even more surprising was when the monkey licked the robot fingers [MORE]. Researchers at Duke were also able to teach one of their rhesus monkeys to control a robot arm. One day this monkey had an epiphany. Its two biological arms went totally limp. It learned to control the robot arm purely by thought. It became the first vertebrate with exactly three separate arms [MORE]. 

Continue to the post to hear how this type of research has implications for helping human quadriplegics.

Big Cats

Subhra Priyadarshini reveals in the Indigenus Blog, why large banners featuring tigers and leopards are being posted in and around India’s national capital region of New Delhi:

The banners, featuring Asia’s big cats —  tigers, leopards, snow leopards and clouded leopards  – threatened by illegal poaching, are part of an eye-catching campaign by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). The black and white pictures have a direct-hitting subtext “Wanted Alive” emphasising the need to keep these felines healthy and happy in their natural habitat. Reproduced here, with permission from WWF, are the pictures that tell their own story.

The tiger remains the largest cat species in the world threatened by illegal trade.  Continue to Subhra’s  post to find out more.

Science network finally comes online

Mohammed Yahia explains in the House of Wisdom Blog that after several long delays due to the events following the uprising in Egypt that toppled the previous ruling regime, a high-speed fibre-optic network linking scientists and educators from around the world has finally linked Egypt into its network:

The Global Ring Network for Advanced Applications Development (GLORIAD) was first formed after the Cold War to link scientists in the United States to their counterparts in Russia. It later extended to cover several countries in the northern hemisphere, reaching out to China, India, Korea and  Singapore. In 2010, Greg Cole, the principal investigator of GLORIAD, announced the network will reach Egypt through its new Taj extension.

You can find out more about GLORIAD in the post.

Technology use

In Pete Etchells’s latest post, he asks if it’s helpful to accuse parents of neglect when it comes to technology use?

The question of whether or not one can become addicted to technology is a contentious one. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders, which contains standard criteria for classifying mental disorders, does not currently contain any sort of classification for internet, technology or video game addiction. While that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist, it does mean there is no standardised way to assess it. In turn, that means that it is difficult to compare and amalgamate the research that has been conducted; if two papers show findings for and against the existence of such an addiction, and they use different measures of technology use and addiction, we can’t be sure whether an inappropriate measure in one study is the cause of their results.

Do you agree with Pete? Feel free to leave your thoughts in his comment thread. 

Just how small are atoms?

Just how small are atoms? asks GrrlScientist this week. The answers turn out to be astounding, even for those who think they know. She links out to a fast-paced video animation that uses spectacular metaphors to give a visceral sense of the building blocks that make our world:

NewDrugs4BadBugs

In the Spoonful of Medicine Blog, Meredith Wadman  discusses the launch of the European Union’s Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) on May24th. This new seven-year effort aims to bring academic and industry researchers together to work on the problem of antibiotic resistance:

Dubbed NewDrugs4BadBugs, the call for proposalsis supported by a €223.7 million budget with roughly half the money to come from the IMI and the remainder from five companies including GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Janssen, Sanofi and Basilea Pharmaceutica, with their contributions including scientific expertise, clinical trial managers and the drugs themselves. As the programme progresses it could eventually disperse some €600 million to researchers working to develop new antibiotics.

The programme is part of the Action Plan Against the Rising Threats from Antimicrobial Resistance, a strategy announced by the European Commission late last year to fight the rise of drug-resistant “superbugs,” from harmful strains of E. Coli to methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MSRA (pictured).

Learn more about the programme in the post.

Tomato Talk

According to Alice Lighton in the News Blog, researchers have answered a question that has bothered gastronomists for years – which is the tastiest tomato? At the same time, they discovered a heady mixture of volatile organic compounds that gives tomatoes a sweeter flavour than their sugar content would suggest:

“People don’t generally like tomatoes that come from supermarkets,” says Denise Tieman, from the University of Florida. The researchers selected about 50 heritage species which they liked the taste of and grew well in the Florida sunshine. To find out what makes heirlooms so good, Tieman and her colleagues analysed the volatile organic compounds in heirloom and supermarket tomatoes, and asked volunteers to rate varieties based on their deliciousness and intensity of flavour.

According to their study, published in Current Biology, certain volatiles enhance the inherent sweetness in the fruits. Tomatoes with high content of a particular apocarotenoid tasted sweeter. Previous studies have shown that consumers don’t like fruits with low quantities of apocarotenoids. The compounds could be used as a sweetener, allowing manufacturers to reduce the sugar content of processed foods. “If the food industry wanted to use these compounds, they’re available,” says Tieman.

Deep-sea creatures may be hitchhiking on scientific gear

Daniel Cressey reveals in the News Blog that the world’s most famous research submersible may have inadvertently been carrying invasive species between the deep-water sites it has spent decades studying:

Since its creation in 1964, the venerable Alvin sub has performed thousands of dives, and its successes include surveying the Titanic and probing the first discovered hydrothermal vents.

In 2004 a team of scientists using Alvin found 38 tiny limpets of a type normally seen on hydrothermal vents in samples they had grabbed from an area with no vents. In fact, they were hundreds of kilometres north of the known range of the species they found. Their conclusion: the animals had hitched a ride on Alvin after a previous dive.

“I was so upset when I came to that realization,” says Janet Voight, a deep-sea biologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois, and the lead scientist on that mission.

More information on Voight’s report, in Daniel’s post.

The Wisdom in X-rays

This week’s Soapbox Science post is by final year Astrophysics PhD student, Markus Hammonds. He details the setbacks and struggles associated with X-ray astronomy:

You see, X-ray astronomy is something of a specialist art. The realm of high energy astrophysical phenomena, concerns curious and poorly understood objects, such as black hole event horizons, supernova remnants and active galactic nuclei. Speaking as someone who works mostly with optical telescopes, without sufficient help and guidance I’d be quite lost in the world of X-rays. But therein lies the problem. With a huge setback like this, many specialists will be forced to disperse to other fields, or even (the thing we all fear the most) leave astronomy altogether. There won’t be the same amount of experts to guide the field anymore and certainly not with the same skill level. The fear is that all of X-ray astronomy will lose momentum and the skill levels of those involved will be set back by years. Simultaneously, while research into high energy astrophysics stagnates, all other fields will be progressing at an even faster rate. Over the next few decades, as some areas of astronomy move forward in leaps and bounds, life is going to get difficult for the X-ray community. With mostly ageing instruments available, there’s likely to be a shortage of both data and funding to go around. X-rays may well be left out in the cold.

Follow through to the post to find out more.

Son’s Cells Linked To Mother’s Cancer

Until now, scientists did not know that the presence of fetal cells is linked to risks of cancer in the mother, reveals Scitable’s blogger, Khalil A. Cassimally:

But a new study published in the European Journal of Cancer indicates that the presence of Y-chromosome (or male) fetal cells may well play some role. The news is a mixture of good and bad: it is possible that the presence of Y-chromosome fetal cells may have a protective role against breast cancer but an enhancing role for colon cancer.

At this point, it is important to stress that the study does not definitely state that fetal cells are responsible for a lesser chance of breast cancer and a greater chance of colon cancer. Instead, it merely shows a correlation between the presence of those cells and the respective risks of breast and colon cancers.

Find out more about this study in his post.

Solar Eclipse

Take a look a Paige Brown’s pictures of the solar eclipse that took place this week. Her images are from a levee overlooking the Mississippi river in Baton Rouge, Louisiana: