Ever wonder why the calendar requires us to retool a schedule every year? Ever question why your birthday will fall on a different day of the week next year? Do you grit your teeth trying to remember to insert a leap day every four years, except on the century, except you do add a leap day on the fourth century?

Any rule that requires a double-exception to the exception, friend, is a rule that has overstayed its welcome.

Our calendar must account for the fact that Earth rotates 365.2422 times during one full orbit of the sun, so any calendar will require some shimming.

Two questions: How many shims are too many? And how many people would be willing to swap out the clunky calendar for a better one? Remember, no matter how smart the invention, inertia always gives an undeserved advantage to tried-and-true kludges like the QWERTY keyboard, invented to slow your typing speed.

Shims and arrows of outrageous calendar

The modern calendar dates to 46 B.C., when Julius Caesar (or more likely a lackey) built a calendar on the assumption that the year contains 365.24 days.

For a while, that was close enough, but by the 16th century, the tiny error was adding up, and the actual seasons no longer jibed with the calendar. In 1582, Pope Gregory (or was it his flunkeys?) pruned 11 days from October and produced the modern calendar.

The Gregorian calendar, sadly, still relies on that jury-rigged leap day, and it also forces any given date, whether holiday or not, to rotate around the seven days of the week like a weather vane in a tornado.

All those encumbrances bothered Richard Conn Henry, a professor of astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s disjointed, hideously inefficient and there’s no value added,” he told us.

Hideously inefficient?

Rather than kvetch ’til the end of days, however, Henry worked with Steve H. Hanke, an economist also at Hopkins, to build the logical, “permanent” calendar seen in the rollover, above.

Henry studies an obscure type of background radiation in the universe. We mentioned that astronomers are obsessed with time, date and Earth’s position, but Henry says, “I got into this calendar as a complete sideline. Some years ago, I was putting together a schedule for my course, and I thought, ‘Why do I have to put together a schedule? I just taught the same identical course.’ The reason is the stupid calendar changes each year in a pattern that is completely irregular.”

Nor was he the only person with this problem, he realized. “Every school, team, club, everybody has to go through this. But it’s not necessary at all. We can make a simple adjustment, preserve religious sensibilities, and come up with a stable calendar.”

Calling clever calendars

The Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar has 12 months: four have 31 days, and eight have 30. Each quarter of the year is 91 days long, with two 30-day months and one 31-day month. Each year starts on Sunday, meaning Christmas is also Sunday.

Every year.

If you’ve been pecking keys on your calculator, you’ve already objected: I’ve been short-changed! The year has only 364 days! Right, and to compensate, every five or six years, we get an added seven-day week.

The freebie week, while not part of a month, allows the calendar to jibe with the seasons.

Beyond simplicity, the new calendar would help the money-changers, Hanke observes. Financial institutions calculate interest on a daily basis, but months have different numbers of days, and calculations require a lot of software tweaks. “Our calendar would simplify financial calculations and eliminate what we call the ‘rip off’ factor,” explains Hanke. “To determine how much interest accrues on mortgages, bonds, forward-rate agreements, swaps and others, day counts are required. Our current calendar is full of anomalies that have led to the establishment of a wide range of conventions that attempt to simplify interest calculations.”

Can the new calendar fly? The Gregorian calendar won acceptance because the Pope backed it, Henry notes, but he’s not sure he can get papal participation this time around. But without widespread acceptance, an “improved” calendar would really make things even worse.

Image: eliazar

Here’s a great idea that flopped: Part of a lesson in Esperanto, a simplified language invented in 1887 that, sadly, never caught on and brought international peace despite its many practical advantages.

One time fits all?

We’ve been saving the best for last. Doesn’t a stable calendar deserve a universal system of time? That’s right: one time, one date, worldwide. If it’s midnight in London (already hour zero on universal time), it’s midnight in San Francisco — where the sun is shining.

For people who do lots of traveling, or arrange international meetings, the advantages are obvious. Although this sounds awkward to The Why Files, Henry notes that, “In every single country, with zero exceptions,” airplane pilots already use coordinated universal time (UTC) rather than local time.

UTC helps fight confusion in the air, but even Henry recognizes that one-time-fits-all could be a tougher harder sell than the permanent calendar. The new calendar, he says, can stand on its own. “There are 365.2422 days in the year, there is nothing you can do about that. Our calendar must reflect that length. We have to take that magic number that nature has given us by accident and see what kind of calendar we can make.”

You have read it in black and white: the economy is improving: Factories are hiring. Adding 200,000 jobs in December cut the unemployment rate to 8.5 percent. Consumer confidence is rising, and cars are selling again.

Meanwhile, corporate profits hit a record $2-trillion a year, and since the cataclysm in 2008, real gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services, has grown for more than two years.

These economic measures are broad, ubiquitous and reliable, but there are other ways to measure the economy. If you poke around, you’ll find economists — on Wall Street and Elm Street alike — with their own idiosyncratic economic indicators.

Like the GDP and unemployment rate, many are less forecasting tools than measures of the current economy. That may diminish their prognostic value, but not their human-humorous-interest value.

To stay or to vacate?

Vacations, however necessary, can be expensive, and so when the economy tanked in 2008, we began to hear about the cost-cutting “staycation.” By taking time off from work (assuming we had a job…) without leaving home, we could enjoy friends, family and local attractions: parks, museums, lakes and beaches.

We could, in other words, enjoy many of the benefits of a vacation while ducking the hefty price tag. Staycations can have pizazz: would you rather be taking off your shoes in a frenetic airport or building a tree house with the kids?

We failed to find anybody who studies staycations, so the best we can say about their merit as economic indicators is that past performance is no guarantee of future success; read the full prospectus before investing!

Vacant at home

It doesn’t take a Rhodes scholar to deduce from foreclosure stats or photos of abandoned houses that housing remains a black hole in the American economy. But like the staycation, a foreclosure boom follows a sour economy, and is more informative about the immediate past than about the immediate future.

We were, however, intrigued to learn that foreclosure could be a disease vector. Clouds of mosquitoes are breeding in abandoned ponds and swimming pools at foreclosed homes in Arizona.

That gives us another reason to hate skeeters, even if their whine is the sound of love.

Sports: No rush to the finish line

Pro-sport tickets are not cheap, so a full stadium must signify a healthy economy. But it ain’t necessarily so, says Andrew Billings, who studies broadcasting and sports at the University of Alabama. “People often get a flawed picture from simply going by attendance figures. It depends on the sport.”

In the National Football League, he notes, “the majority of stadiums sell out, and demand far exceeds supply.” Before a sick economy leads to empty seats, he says, it deflates ticket prices on resale markets, “but you will still see a full stadium, and may think the economy must not be too bad, even if the demand is cut in half.”

And don’t bother counting duffers at a private golf course, either, Billings says. A full golf course “is not always a straight-off indicator of prosperity,” because the major expense is the cost of membership. “For many people, once they have bought the membership, the costs are sunk, and golf becomes the cheap option for entertainment.”

When money is tight, he says, “They may be playing twice as frequently because it’s already paid for.”

Big screen, big sales, bogus economic indicator?

You might think sales of pricy electronic goods, including those “mine-is-bigger-than-yours” TVs, would closely track prosperity, but Billings says they “may be another misleading measure.”

Many of those giant video screens, more suited to aircraft hangers than living rooms, are bought to watch sports, and looking at the full economic picture reveals the folly of the sales = prosperity equation, he says.

Consider the cost of season tickets for big-league sports — up to $20,000 for a seat behind home plate at the New York Yankees. When times get bad, Billings says, “The buyer may think, ‘Why don’t I get a $2,000 TV and the major-league baseball package? Once you add in parking and food, sports can be very expensive, and that makes the flat screen look pretty cheap.”

Although another flat-screen sale may contribute to the image of prosperity, Billings says, this fan “has really cut their budget to avoid going to the stadium.”

Pretty Byzantine?

How do we get a measure of economic activity in the long, dark epoch before the invention of the GDP or the flat-screen television? In the 14th century, during the death throes of the Byzantine empire, the church was an economic engine and a wealth center. If you bought a marriage license, you paid the church, which also owned buildings, even entire communities.

Because churches hold some of the best documents from the period, some scholars have proposed using records of church wealth as a proxy for economic development — or decline — during this benighted epoch before the spreadsheet was envisioned.

Garbage everywhere

With the possible exception of unwrapped broccoli from a local farm, everything you buy creates garbage, and the garbage disposal system is always affected by economic slowdowns.

Duh.

But we were surprised to hear that garbage can offer almost a real-time economic readout. According to Edward Humes, author of the forthcoming book Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, “Until the housing bubble burst, the largest landfill in the country, by intake, was Puente Hills in Los Angeles County, which was taking up to the legal limit, 13,000 tons per day. This was cut in half after the housing bubble burst. Home construction and demolition debris fell as construction stopped, and people started buying less stuff.”

Construction fell so quickly, Humes says, that “Landfill operators probably saw [bad economic] things coming ahead of a lot of the rest of us.”

Even “durable goods” can quickly start bulking up the garbage stream, he says. “So much of what we buy is pretty ephemeral, even the stuff defined as durable goods must last just one year. A lot of it is designed to be thrown away; not fixed. The age of the TV repairman is long behind us.”

Garbage tells us about more than just economics, Humes adds. “It’s a little scary, one of our greatest exports is trash. We used to make things, and now we make trash.”

Although high garbage flows correlate to prosperity, Humes says the linkage cannot last forever. “Every culture figures out” that wasting resources is not a long-term solution, he says. “Suddenly, when resources are scarce, humans get more conscious of how much they have wasted, but by then it’s too late.”

Night lights, big city

Can lights at night, as seen from space, measure a region’s economy? After all, lighting requires bulbs, generators, energy and wires, so the argument has face validity. But a 2011 study returned mixed results. Night lights were a useful gauge in 25 percent to 33 percent of counties in the United States (excluding Alaska and Hawaii). In India, night lights gave a useful picture of local GDP in a “very small number” of districts.

And in China, fewer than 10 percent of districts showed a significant correlation between night lights and GDP. One reason: light from the intense coastal urbanization overwhelmed the satellite’s sensors and could not be measured accurately.

Underwater underwear

Alan Greenspan, who ran the Federal Reserve for oh-so-many years, was said to favor sales of men’s underwear as an economic indicator. His theory: When times get tight, men decide to forgo the pleasure of a new pair of briefs or boxers.

We were unable to unearth evidence for this notion, but wish to ask two follow-up questions: Do sales of women’s underwear convey an economic message? And how do you know?

Stick with lipstick?

If men can withstand the urge to buy boxers and briefs, women apparently can’t cut back on “small indulgences” like lipstick. In 2001, the chair of Estee Lauder coined “lipstick index” to explain why lipstick sales rise during a bad economy.

Going to war

For some, the military is a job of last resort, and so the number and quality of new recruits offers a proxy for economic conditions.

But military recruiting ads may be just as telling as the numbers. In 2009, the New York Times described a new Marines ad showing “men crawling through mud and under barbed wire, being smacked in the head with padded fighting sticks, vomiting after inhaling tear gas and diving, boots and all, into a swimming pool.”

With so many potential recruits in the job market, the ad didn’t bother soft-selling the rigors of Marine life.

Recouping the coupons

When pressed for coins, why not cash in on those coupons that clutter mailboxes and newspapers? In hard times, coupon redemptions do rise, according to a company that processes them.

Skirting the economic reality?

If we can believe QI, a quiz show from the United Kingdom, long hair and short skirts are both signs of prosperity. Hey, we tried, but failed, to track this revelation back to a legit study, but still give thanks to reader “St Ga” for the suggestion, and for an elegant mix-mastering of cause and effect: “If the government makes short skirts & long hair compulsory for EVERYONE will the economy improve? :)”

We wish.

Poke deep inside an insect cell, and you may be in for a shock. At least we were startled to learn that bacteria live inside many insects, including the fruit fly, one of the workhorses of biology.

Photo: Biodiversity Institute of Ontario

The star of the study, Drosophila mauritiana.

Today, we hear how bacteria of the genus Wolbachia boost egg production in certain fruit flies. The mechanism, says Horacio Frydman, an assistant professor of biology at Boston University, involves a two-step: first the fly makes more egg cells, and then it blocks a process that would normally prune away extra eggs.

Insects, like other animals, are frequently “married” to bacteria in a relationship that benefits one or both parties. This is common: Bacteria in the cow’s rumen break down cellulose eaten by the cow. Bacteria in the human gut form vitamin K, necessary for blood clotting.

And bacteria in aphids synthesize essential amino acids that the aphids cannot make by themselves.
Wolbachia are not essential to the fruit flies, but their presence can quadruple egg production.

Speeding breeding

Producing four times as many offspring “is a powerful driver of infection,” Frydman says. “Wolbachia manipulate their host reproduction to favor their own spread in nature,” noting that in less than 20 years after Wolbachia was detected in fruit flies in southern California, the infection had spread as far as Canada. “It’s considered one of the largest pandemics in the recent evolution of life. Because Wolbachia influence their host reproduction, they also impact the evolutionary history of innumerable hosts.”

Wolbachia have been linked with a wide variety of effects in the insect realm. Wolbachia “lives in at least 20 percent of the world’s arthropods, including insects, spiders, mites, and crustaceans,” according to the Wolbachia project, making them an active area of investigation.

How could this symbiosis work to increase the number of offspring?

Using sophisticated microscopy, Frydman, Ph.D. student Eva Fast and colleagues tracked the location of Wolbachia in fruit flies. In D. mauritiana, a species native to the Mauritius Islands in the Indian Ocean, the bacteria congregate in the germline stem cell niche — a structure that supports stem cells that develop into eggs. In D. melanogaster, the bacteria accumulate in the niche that harbors a different type of stem cell, which produces the eggshell.

In the germline stem cell niche, the bacteria actually outnumber mitochondria, organelles involved in making energy for the fly.

Having the bacteria in the germline stem cell niche doubled the rate of division among those stem cells. Further investigation showed that the bacteria later also halved the rate of programmed cell death.
So the bottom line was a four-fold increase in egg production.

The virtue of pruning

“It’s remarkable that there are two mechanisms being manipulated by the bacteria, the rate of egg production and the rate of programmed cell death,” says Frydman.

Hitting both systems makes sense, Frydman adds, although the mechanisms remain unclear. “It is not surprising that Wolbachia would evolve to manipulate those two process, because they are key in controlling the rate of egg production, and therefore it has a profound impact in the reproductive success of the infected host and in spreading of bacteria in nature.”

Anything that increases the number of eggs and offspring is likely to be favored by natural selection, Frydman adds.

Photo: CDC, #373

Parasitic worms cause elephantiasis, which afflicts this man from the Philippines. Could killing Wolbachia prevent this disfiguring disease?

A healthy thing?

Beyond an insight into the fascinating biology of symbiosis, the finding could also have health implications. Parasitic worms that cause diseases like elephantiasis seem to benefit from Wolbachia infection.

And Wolbachia can affect insect immunity: Tests have shown that infected fruit flies are more resistant to some viruses, for example. And a recent paper in Nature found that mosquitoes in Australia could not transmit dengue fever if they carried a Wolbachia strain derived from Drosophila.

Mosquitoes also transmit malaria. Conceivably, better knowledge of the interaction between Wolbachia and insects might convert mosquitoes from a carrier of this ancient scourge into a defense against it.

– David J. Tenenbaum

You see them, and you sniff. Apples are as boring, as generic as a fruit can get. They lack the cachet of red grapes, oozing life-extending resveratrol. Unlike blueberries or pomegranates, they are not celebrated for supplying palate-pleasing megadoses of antioxidants.

So why did some wit observe, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”? That question has been on the mind of Bahram Arjmandi, professor and chair of the department of nutrition, food and exercise sciences at Florida State University.

His answer, presented at the Experimental Biology 2011 meeting in Washington this week, admittedly seems too good to be true: Apples have a profound effect on total cholesterol, and also on the “good” and “bad” types of cholesterol. They caused a major reduction in inflammatory proteins that are implicated in a number of serious diseases.

Not only does this “medicine” taste good, but unlike cholesterol-control pills, it does not attack the liver. And last we heard, you can buy them without a prescription.

“An apple a day” or a “fateful fruit”?

In the Bible, “the apple was an evil food in the story of Adam and Eve,” Arjmandi says, “then someone said, ‘An apple a day…’ and that gave them a positive image. I thought, if there is that saying, there might be a reason for it, but you’d be amazed at how little has been done in clinical studies.”

Animals were apparently eating apples long before Adam and Eve. Photo: LASZLO ILYES

To get answers, Arjmandi rounded up 100 women who had just passed menopause — a time when dropping levels of estrogen lead to unhealthy changes in cholesterol levels that allow women to catch up with the male rate of cardiovascular disease.

Randomly dividing his volunteers, Arjmandi asked one group to supplement their normal diet with dried prunes. The treatment group got one-a-day packages containing 75 grams — about 2.5 ounces — of dried apple.

Arjmandi used dry apples rather than the equivalent one or two fresh apples as a way to standardize the “dose,” but he says fresh fruit is likely to be even more healthy.

If the object of these tests was a pill, the results after one year would certainly boost the stock of the drugmaker: among the apple-eaters, total cholesterol fell by 14 percent and low-density lipoprotein (LDL, the harmful fraction of cholesterol) fell 23 percent. High levels of both total cholesterol and LDL are linked to damage to blood vessels, heart attacks and strokes.

Meanwhile, the level of a protective type of cholesterol called high-density lipoprotein (HDL) rose 3 to 4 percent.

(Anti-) inflammatory results

Moving beyond cholesterol, the level of C-reactive protein fell 32 percent. “This is significant, and not just in a statistical sense but in clinical relevance,” says Arjmandi. “CRP is associated with inflammation, and is considered a marker for cardiovascular disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.”

Does 'an apple a day...' translate into Japanese? Photo: Luca Moglia

Seeing such a major reduction from such a simple “treatment” is “amazing,” Arjmandi said.

And although the women in the test group were eating about 240 calories of dry apple each day, they lost an average of about three pounds over the year — perhaps because apple makes people feel full.

The study was partly funded by the United States Department of Agriculture, and got no funding from the apple industry. Although the report, as far as we know, has not been peer reviewed, talks at scientific meetings are routinely used to introduce new studies and new concepts.

And the active ingredient is…

What makes apples so healthy? Although both pectin, a soluble fiber, and chemicals called polyphenols are thought to confer health benefits, Arjmandi says, “an apple is more than these compounds. I’ve been working on functional foods [which give health benefits] for 20 years, and I find it’s not good to approach whole fruit or whole vegetables like drugs. If you isolate the component chemicals and take them, you get some benefits, but you will deprive yourself of greater benefits.”

Are some apples better than others? “For pectin, the firmer the better,” says Arjmandi. “Otherwise, most varieties, from jonathan to red delicious, give more or less the same benefit.”

Polyphenols are concentrated in the peel; pectin is found throughout the apple, he adds.

Last question: Did the study participants get sick of snacking on dry apple day after day? Some did, and quit the study, but “those who like them became addicted,” says Arjmandi. “The longer they were on it, the more they liked apple. Afterwards, some contacted us to ask if we can provide them with apple.”

Supermarkets, actually, carry apples side-by-side with other non-prescription produce.

Based on these results, Arjmandi would like to test the apple-a-day prescription more broadly. “I’d like to do a multi-state trial. Eating 75 grams of apple is not that difficult, and finding people with moderately high cholesterol is not that difficult.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

They are the ear-wrenching, jaw-jangling junk of the scientific world, the poly-syllabic, hexa-enjargonated children of the refereed journal. Cobbled higgledy-piggledy, these stacks of Greek and Latin roots are primed with prefixii and capped with suffixii.

Some of these mongrelized mutants say the uber-obvious: Does “biomedicine” not equal “medicine”?

More of them seem to say the obscure, redundant or ridiculous, like “biomolecular medicine.” Eh?

Did ancient civilizations follow astrolacism to find their way around? Photo: Gerard Mercator

You don’t need much experience reading science to adopt a love-hate relationship with the incessant onslaught of obscurity: Some of these terms, like “decadal mean,” (average temperature during a specific 10-year period) have real utility and no synonyms, and you’d best learn them and soldier on.

Others seem mainly designed to serve as scientific ownership flags staked by the first to discover a phenomenon — whether it’s actually new or not.

Evidence of early-onset electrostatic compulsion? Photo: Steve Paine

And at a time when record numbers of people communicate in English, and that well-known tongue is the standard language for many scientific papers, why must every new hunk of jargon originate in Greek or Latin — or preferably both?

We could go on to decry the esthetic obnoxion of fabrications like “pharmacological,” which often could be replaced by the rather simpler “drug.”

Enough whining. We must move to today’s challenge:

Below, we’ve briefly defined some scientific jargon. Please tell us which are real, and which we concocted.

Positive “JargoPro” points are awarded for obscurity, over-reliance on Greek and Latin, length (measured in syllables), a grating quality on the ear, and esthetic points for excessive use of linguistic force.

Negative “JargoCon” points go to ease of pronunciation and a heightened chance that mere mortals may comprehend and even pronounce the term.

Pharmaco-optimalic (concerning the visual presentation of drugs)

JargoPro: Nice use of multiple obscure roots; ambiguity (does “optimalic” refer to a state of mind, or to optics)?

JargoCon: Rather straightforward pronunciation.

Phyto-viability: Real Or Fake?	SelectShow
Real, solid jargon!

Phyto-viability (ability of soils to promote plant survival)

JargoPro: Incorporates the Greek “Ph” phoneme instead of the more familiar Anglo-Saxon “f”; also grating on the ear.

JargoCon: Use of hyphen fosters understanding; perilously comprehensible to the one percent who recognize “phyt” as the Greek root for “plant.”

Did this plant succumb to poor phyto-viability or just neglect? Photo: pete_pick

Electrostatic compulsion: Real Or Fake?	SelectShow
Fake: April Fool’s!

Electrostatic compulsion (gravitational pull between silicon-powered screens and human minds)

JargoPro: The adjective seems familiar, but is tantalizingly obscure.

JargoCon: Condition is so common that readers may jump to the correct conclusion about meaning, always a negative to a jargoneer!

Stoichiometry: Real Or Fake?	SelectShow
Real, solid jargon!

Stoichiometry (related to the proportions of chemical elements in a chemical reaction)

JargoPro: Symmetrical, reverse-reiteration of “oi” as “io”; essentially unpronounceable.

JargoCon: Fundamental concept, so the term may be necessary.

Polymorphism: Real Or Fake?	SelectShow
Real, solid jargon!

Polymorphism (taking several different shapes)

JargoPro: Elegant concatenation of the Greeks: “poly” (many) and “morph” (shape).

JargoCon: At four syllables, syllabically deficient, thus impairing incomprehensibility.

Are the differently colored heads of these gouldian finches an example of polymorphism or did one just get into the hair dye? Nigel Jacques

Astrolacism: Real Or Fake?	SelectShow
Fake: April Fool’s!

Astrolacism (use of stars as fixed points in geography)

JargoPro: Suffic-ates with the opaque “-ism”; exploits confusion between astronomy and astrology.

JargoCon: Some people will understand “astro” as related to astronomy, and therefore stars.

Longitudinal: Real Or Fake?	SelectShow
Real, solid jargon!

Longitudinal (variations over time)

JargoPro: Easily dropped into an otherwise-comprehensible sentence; also may confuse geographers who think it refers to imaginary, north-south lines on maps.

JargoCon: Easy to pronounce, so long as you catch the soft “g”

Gastrophrenology: Real Or Fake?	SelectShow
Fake: April Fool’s!

Gastrophrenology (study of the correlation between microstructures in the small intestine and surface of the cranium)

JargoPro: Strong reliance on dead languages for roots; induces guilt — is this something your doctor warned about last year?

JargoCon: Although “phren” is satisfyingly opaque, “gastro” may give away at least part of meaning.

Etiological: Real Or Fake?	SelectShow
Real, solid jargon!

Etiological (related to causes)

JargoPro: Enviable compression of six syllables in 11 letters; tricky pronunciation leads with a long “E” where a short “e” is expected.

JargoCon: Basic meaning is accessible to all; streamlined American spelling avoids the “we’re Brits so we can add letters whenever we want” blighted spelling “aetiological.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

]]> http://whyfiles.org/2011/english-is-optional-dept/feed/ 0 http://whyfiles.org/2011/animal-love/ http://whyfiles.org/2011/animal-love/#comments Fri, 11 Feb 2011 00:07:34 +0000 svmedaristwf http://whyfiles.org/?p=14243 Woof: Happy Valentine’s day!

ENLARGE

Photo: Clemi2000

The mute swan displays elaborate courtship rituals to woo its lifelong mate.

Admit it: You love your dog, your cat, even your white rat.

And so you’re planning to lavish a platter of filet mignon on your doggy-love… a plank of sushi-grade tuna on kitty numero-uno, and some aged cheese on your rodent.

But do our dogs, cats and rats love us back?

Sure, parrots are endlessly uttering “I love you” on You Tube, and some bereaved dogs seem to grieve for their dead owners.

ENLARGE

© David J Tenenbaum

Are these cats in love, or do they just like to sleep on each other?

ENLARGE

©S.V. Medaris

And yes, some animals “love” to spend time together.

But that doesn’t answer our nagging question: Can animals really love?

Or are we projecting our own feelings of affiliation, closeness, and passion on beasts that don’t have the mental machinery to love?

Almost like being in love?

More than half a century ago, Harry Harlow, a research psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, performed experiments that forever changed our view of human and animal emotions. At a time when academic psychologists explored learning and behavior by studying rats, when low-grade learning in a “Skinner Box” was considered high-grade science, when hospitals limited contact between mothers and their newborns, Harlow focused on maternal touch and the emotional life of monkeys.

Harlow removed infant macaques from their mothers, then raised them with a mother surrogate made of cloth or wire. In some experiments, both surrogates were present.

ENLARGE

Photo: Singularity

Psychologist B.F. Skinner designed these “air cribs” for babies to ease parental burdens and facilitate child development, but the absence of human contact may stunt emotional and physical development, not foster it.

Monkeys with the cloth mommas grew up fairly normal, but infants raised with only the wire monkey became fearful and desperate. Their behavior was so bizarre that they seemed psychologically broken by the lack of a loving — or at least a cuddly-if-inanimate — mother.

Infants that had access to both types of bogus mother still relied on the cloth mother for reassurance even if the wire monkey held their bottle.

ENLARGE

Photo: Harlow Primate Laboratory, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This baby macaque was one of the lucky ones that psychologist Harry Harlow raised by a surrogate cloth mother, which gave some approximation of maternal emotional comfort. Infants raised on wire frames shaped vaguely like mom developed a range of “psychotic” behaviors.

Harlow interpreted the lifelong devastation of maternal deprivation as proof that infant monkeys need love, and that became early, influential evidence that animals can love, says his biographer¹, Deborah Blum, a professor of journalism at UW-Madison. “Up until that point, people were arguing that these animals were not capable of having emotions. Harlow led the way in demonstrating that these animals loved, had affection, mattered to each other. He used the word ‘love’ very deliberately,” Blum adds, even though his fellow psychologists were highly skeptical, not to say scornful, of that notion.

It didn’t take popular psychology, aided by Harlow’s humorous, down-to-earth approach, long to realize that the then-current “scientific” preference for antiseptic infancy would deprive young people of necessary contact, Blum notes. The instinctive desire to hug an infant, it turned out, gained support from the most rigorous scientific experiments.

My romance

Scientists who say that primates need maternal love are no longer mocked by their peers. But what is love? Charles Snowdon, a UW-Madison professor of psychology who has explored primate behavior for 35 years, offers this definition: “a preference for one other individual that is more or less exclusive and long-lasting, and that transcends other relationships.”

Animal love is evident in behavior when animals are separated from their mates, Snowdon says. “In species that form lifelong attachments, if a mate dies or disappears, often the remaining mate does not form a new pair bond at all.”

ENLARGE

Photo: Postdlf

Small monkey with a big heart: The mates’ reunion in the cotton-top tamarin resembles reunions among human lovers: hugging, cuddling and “love” making.

ENLARGE

Photo: Sergey Yeliseev

The jackdaw is a relative of the crow. Frans de Waal of Emory University told us that when he used to work with jackdaws, the “widow” in a couple sometimes died shortly after the mate. (According to a new study²), married people are 1.4 times more likely to die after losing a mate.)

Snowdon says the cotton-top tamarin he studied form strong attachments. “If they were separated, they would begin long calls, at a rate much higher than they would give when together. These plaintive calls would last for the entire 30 minutes of separation. When they were reunited, they cuddled and often had sex.”

As if that did not sound human enough, Snowdon next floored us by discussing “romantic love.” Decades ago, psychologists worked overtime to avoid being accused of anthropomorphism — projecting human qualities onto animals. Now it’s kosher to talk about an emotion once restricted to the primates that buy heart-shaped tchotchkes each February.

Snowdon says romantic love supports the bond in a mated pair, and it’s not just about primates. “Albatrosses and geese appear to form lifelong pair bonds, and robins, blue jays and cardinals might form relationships that last for at least one breeding season; these are strong attachments.”

Snowdon adds that experiments with titi monkeys belie the notion that the sole goal of animal attachment is to nurture the next generation. “If you separate the mother, father and infant from each other, and give them a choice, mothers and fathers choose to be with each other and ignore the baby. It is clear that pairs want to be with each other, to the exclusion of the baby.”

ENLARGE

Photo: Steven G. Johnson

Have these titi monkeys spotted Valentine’s day on the calendar! The monogamous titis, native to South America, often intertwine their tails while sitting or sleeping in a tree.

Like someone in love

While Harlow relied on observing behavior, today scientists study the brain chemicals that mold the Valentine’s heart. One key subject is the hormone oxytocin, which plays a critical role in social bonding and love, both animal and human.

ENLARGE

Photo: Larry Young, Center for Translational Social Neuroscience

The hormone oxytocin is elevated in animals and people with a close, long-term attachment, and helps explain the bond between prairie voles. This mousy, monogamous mammal is a focus of animal love-and-sex studies.

Oxytocin, originally identified for its role in helping mothers bond with newborns, also rises in men and women after sex and other close, emotional encounters. In the big picture, oxytocin enables attachment in humans and other animals, Snowdon says. “You don’t find oxytocin elevated in animals unless they form an adult attachment with one other individual.”

The brain responds to dopamine, a feel-good chemical that is released during many pleasurable activities, including drug-taking. Dopamine also plays a role in animal love – and “marital” fidelity. Mated prairie voles have a higher level of a specific dopamine receptor in a brain region called the nucleus accumbens, says Karen Bales, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California at Davis. “When these are turned on, that prevents them from forming a second pair bond.”

ENLARGE

Photo: Larry Young, Center for Translational Social Neuroscience

The prairie vole’s love centers, AKA oxytocin receptors, are highlighted in orange in this brain portrait.

When owners interact with their dogs, both sides have surges in oxytocin, says Bales, who studies primates at the California National Primate Research Center. “That puts a check in the ‘dogs can love’ box.”

Love fur sale

Because dogs are the most glaring example of an animal that seems to love people, we phoned Patricia McConnell, an author³, and animal behaviorist at UW-Madison. She gave us two key reasons why dogs can love: “Their physiology for creating social attachment is so similar to ours, and they behave in ways that, if any human did it, we’d label it love, attachment.”

ENLARGE

Like many other mammals, dogs respond to oxytocin: “It’s a huge part of social attachment, and physiologically it’s almost an exact replica of oxytocin in humans,” McConnell says.

Dogs appear to grieve, McConnell adds. “They get distressed when someone they are attached to is gone. There are lots of credible examples of dogs risking their lives to save a human. We are so different from dogs in so many ways, but in some ways, we are more similar to them than to other animals. What other species is obsessed with the fate of a ball?”

If dogs love us, what about each other? “Absolutely, yes,” says McConnell. “I have seen dogs behave as if they instantly fell in love: they are animated, their eyes were shining, they were extra playful. But I’ve also seen dogs that clearly took an instant dislike to each other.”

Dogs, like people, are picky, so it’s not always possible to replace a deceased member of a tight pair, McConnell says. “When people get another dog, they’re often surprised that the resident dog is not thrilled. We see the exact same thing in people: Personalities can clash or meld. When someone you know dies, it will not help if a stranger walks in off the street.”

ENLARGE

Photos ©S.V. Medaris

Ivan (Great Pyrenees) and Dexter (Jack Russell/Rat Terrier) demonstrate the bond of brothers.

You don’t know what love is

Still, animals can’t say what they are feeling, and so we must rely on measurements and observations. Interpreting animal behavior can be difficult, says Marga Vicedo, a historian of science at the University of Toronto who has written about Harlow’s experiments.⁴

Vicedo recalls members of an animal-behavior seminar who would “discuss, week after week, how you would interpret it when they look left — or right? You are seeing a behavior, and from the behavior, you have to hypothesize about the emotions, but there is not a perfect correlation between animal and human emotions.”

Interpreting the emotional basis of behavior is difficult enough with people, Vicedo observes. “We may laugh at a meeting, but inside we are depressed. You can only observe behavior, and have to figure out its relationship to emotion and feeling.”

Stephen Marc Breedlove, who studies hormones and behavior at Michigan State University, reiterated that problem. “Whether you think your dog loves you or your boyfriend loves you, there is the same problem: you see the behavior and from that, you infer these feelings. With a partner, you can ask, but since people do lie, that is not completely reliable.”

ENLARGE

Photo: Mara 1

Scientists believe that attachment in elephant families may rival attachment in people. Love between mother and baby is surprisingly strong; mother-daughter bonds often last 50 years.

My one and only love?

Our improved understanding of what’s going on inside the brain provides more ways to analyze animal emotion, Breedlove says. “In certain species, there is neural circuitry that helps monogamous pairs stay attached to one another. We know the same systems can be present in humans — and although we don’t know they serve the exact same function, there is some danger in insisting we are absolutely unique in every way. Natural selection produces a continuum of traits, we can’t have something arise from nothing.”

Indeed, evolution is a great re-user of its own inventions, as Breedlove stresses. “What is the evidence that makes you think love arose absolutely de novo [without precedent] in our species? And then, when did it arise, in Mesopotamia?”

The notion that animals can love is part of a scientific sea change. Once upon a time — even after Harlow — identifying emotions in animals was considered anthropomorphism, a fatal fallacy that could ruin a career in psychology or animal behavior.

Now, we have seen a “change in the zeitgeist [the spirit of the time],” says Breedlove. “People are open to the possibility that animals have emotions, and I think that is a step forward, a sign of maturity of the field. Anthropomorphism is definitely a risky business, but people are less worried that they will be written off as cranks just because they say something that could be interpreted as anthropomorphism.”

As we’ve seen, many scientists are even willing to discuss parallels in animal and human love. Heresy!

ENLARGE

Photo: Kjunstorm

Monogamous bonds between flamingos are constantly reinforced, through vocalizations, feeding side-by-side, teamwork during conflicts with other birds, and elaborate courtship rituals.

ENLARGE

Photo: Dora Biro

Chimp mothers may continue caring for dead babies. Does this powerful mother-infant bond amount to love? Maybe, but we can’t definitively know what emotions drive the mother’s behavior.

Almost like being in love

In burying the old “animals are just beasts that cannot have feelings” mentality, nobody has been more influential than primatologist Frans de Waal of Emory University. When we asked whether animals can love, he responded, “Mammals are almost made for attachment, because of their maternal care obligations, the female is attached to her offspring and vice versa. There is a whole brain circuitry attached to that.”

Still, the subjective aspect is hard to know, de Waal admits. Even though studies find attachment, affiliation — and arguably love — in rodents, dogs and primates, “what they experience is not something we can know, but given that they show all the signs of attachment, they spend time together, are distressed if they are separated, and show what looks like happy behavior when they are reunited,” it’s unclear why we should deny the obvious explanation: these animals have emotions.

“If a chimp’s offspring dies,” de Waal says, “it usually keeps carrying it around until it falls apart, so even though the offspring is dead, the attachment stays intact; these are all signs of strong attachments.”

ENLARGE

Comes love

We asked de Waal if we could summarize his view as, ‘It looks like love, but we’ll never know?’ but he said we had it backwards. “My assumption is the other way around, that if animals that are closely related to us, as monkeys and chimps certainly are, and do similar things under similar circumstances, we have to assume the psychology behind it is similar. It would be very inefficient for nature to produce the same behavior in different ways in a monkey and a human, it would have to create a different mechanism, a different psychology and neurology. From the Darwinist standpoint it does not make sense that monkeys would arrive at the same place via a different way.”

de Wall said his view is that “If chimps show strong attachment, we have got to assume the psychology is similar, and that would include the experience. That is not an assumption that is easily verified, but I think it is better than the opposite, that it looks the same, but is probably different.”

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Terry Devitt, editor; S.V. Medaris, designer/illustrator; David J. Tenenbaum, feature writer; Amy Toburen, content development executive; Molly Simis, project assistant

Bibliography

1. Love At Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection, Deborah Blum, Berkeley Trade, 2004. ↩
2. Does Widowhood Increase Mortality Risk?: Testing for Selection Effects by Comparing Causes of Spousal Death, Boyle, Paul J, et al, Epidemiology: January 2011 – Volume 22 – Issue 1 – pp 1-5, doi: 10.1097/EDE.0b013e3181fdcc0b. ↩
3. For the love of a dog, Patricia McConnell, Ballantine Books, 2005. ↩
4. Mothers, Machines, and Morals: Harry Harlow’s Work on Primate Love from Lab to Legend, Marga Vicedo, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 45(3), 193-218 Summer 2009 ↩
5. Harry Harlow. ↩
6. The nature of love. ↩
7. Harlow presents his monkey experiment. ↩
8. Love potion. ↩
9. Neurochemistry of love. ↩
10. Neurology and love. ↩
11. Love vs. sexual desire. ↩
12. Elephant emotions. ↩
13. Monogomy gene. ↩
14. Monogamous animals slideshow. ↩
15. The emotional lives of animals. ↩
16. Air crib. ↩
17. Animal friendships. ↩

]]> http://whyfiles.org/2011/animal-love/feed/ 0 http://whyfiles.org/2011/secrets-of-the-micro-farm/ http://whyfiles.org/2011/secrets-of-the-micro-farm/#comments Thu, 20 Jan 2011 20:48:21 +0000 svmedaristwf http://whyfiles.org/?p=13481 Rebranding for amoeba advances with new “first farmers” report

Image: M.J. Grimson & R.L. Blanton

The single-celled amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum has no brain, but its complicated social cycle enables farming.

Amoeba, single-cell, shape-shifters that eat bacteria and live in the dirt, don’t get much respect. When they run out of food, they gang up and move their sorry selves to greener pastures.

Pastures with edible bacteria, that is.

If ever a creature needed re-branding, this is it.

Could labeling amoeba as farmers boost their brand? In the human realm, farming gave rise to cities, writing, metallurgy and the computer in front of your face.

Amoeba don’t use the Internet. And although they do have a cell nucleus, nobody claims they have an ounce of smarts.

But now we know that some amoeba move “seeds” of bacteria to a new location and plant them as a food source. In other words, they farm.

Dictybase, K. Barisic, M. Ecke, C. Heizer, M. Maniak, M. Westphal, R. Albrecht, G. Gerisch, Max-Planck-Institut fur Biochemie, Martinsried, Germany.

Here’s how dicty divides, in images made 10 seconds apart.

Ants grow fungus. Termites and some saltwater snails do ditto. Damselfish grow algae. But until now, nobody has identified any life form that “farms” bacteria, and nobody has identified any single-celled farmers, says Debra Brock, a graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology at Rice University.

Adds Brock, whose report on farming amoeba appears in Nature tomorrow, “Certainly there has never been an amoeba that’s known to farm.”

Bring on the rebranding!

Working with the well-studied amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum (“dicty” to you and me) Brock noticed that the fruiting bodies — reproductive structures that distribute the amoeba in new habitat — seemed to contain bacteria. That was odd, Brock admits. “To get anybody to believe me, I had to prove that the little spots were bacteria, and not an infection.”

When she spotted the sorus (mass of spores) on growth medium, colonies of bacteria grew on some of the plates — showing that about one dicty in three transports bacteria. The bacteria didn’t seem to be a harmful infection, since amoebas with and without bacteria grew similarly, she says.

She fed the shape-shifters antibiotic to kill their bacterial cargo, but when the amoebas resumed eating bacteria, some bacteria showed up in the sorus. Since this only happened with amoebas that had originally carried bacteria, Brock concluded that this was normal, healthy behavior for those amoeba, although she’s can’t yet say whether the bacteria are inside or alongside the amoeba spores.

Photo: Scott Solomon

Fruiting bodies of the amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum contain bacteria and spores of amoebas. Each sorus is attached to a single slug, comprised of about 100,000 individual amoebas.

Wild about amoeba

The project began when Brock was studying wild amoeba rather than a strain that had been living in labs since the 1930s, and she noticed that some clones consistently carried bacteria.

Brock says dictys are “social amoeba” because “they have a structured society, and can exist in two states.” Individual amoebas in the soil eat bacteria, divide and eat some more. So long as edible bacteria are available, “they are perfectly happy to do this,” says Brock. “But if they use up all the food, they start talking to each other with chemical signals: ‘Wow! There’s not enough food!’ And then approximately 100,000 come together to form a slug.”

Development in a social amoeba

Click any image to enlarge

Image credits (L to R): Bruno in Columbus (1, 2, 3), David Brown & Joan E. Strassmann (4).

Thousands of dicty amoebas are merging to form a slug that can wander to find food. Three photos show part of the amoeba’s social cycle, which is shown in its entirety in the last panel. Last panel shows the social and vegetative cycles of Dictyostelium discoideum.

The slug serves as a truck to haul amoeba to new territory, Brock says. “During the multi-cellular part of the life cycle, they are starving, and they want to go somewhere else.”

The slug eventually shoots up a stalk containing amoeba spores, and among the farmers, bacteria. When the sorus opens, the bacteria can plant themselves as amoeba food.

Reminds us of Johnny Appleseed…

The Darwinian decision

Why does the same species of dicty use two survival strategies? Why do some farm while others don’t? “It’s a smart evolutionary strategy,” says Brock. “It’s bet-hedging. If you happen to land in a patch without bacteria, farmers have a great advantage because they bring their food with them, which allows them to grow and divide and bear a huge number of progeny while the poor non-farmers have nothing to eat.”

But while the farmers quit eating before they remove all bacteria from their old location, non-farmers can eat all those bacteria, so non-farmers do benefit if the new home already contains edible bacteria.

Apparently, both strategies work, because both have survived the evolutionary gauntlet. Brock is exploring whether a “farmer gene” causes some amoeba to hoard bacteria…

It’s enough to give a person a new respect for protozoans, which offers a firm basis for rebranding. “From quite a long time ago, we’ve thought we are so special,” says Brock, “but you can’t imagine the number of genes the amoeba has that are just like human genes. It’s scary; it takes you down a notch or two.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

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Terry Devitt, editor; S.V. Medaris, designer/illustrator; David J. Tenenbaum, feature writer; Amy Toburen, content development executive; Molly Simis, project assistant

Bibliography

1. D. discoidum. ↩
2. Dicty database. ↩
3. Dicty resources. ↩
4. The cheating amoeba. ↩
5. Social amoeab research. ↩
6. Ants herding aphids. ↩

]]> http://whyfiles.org/2011/secrets-of-the-micro-farm/feed/ 0 http://whyfiles.org/2010/the-morning-after/ http://whyfiles.org/2010/the-morning-after/#comments Wed, 29 Dec 2010 22:47:57 +0000 svmedaristwf http://whyfiles.org/?p=13023

Photos of Times Square: Bill Larkin, and Hungover: Álvaro Canivell.

The night before: friendship, frivolity, froth in Times Square. Mouseover for the morning after : (

Hangover: Getting to the root of pain

You survived Christmas. Next up: the annual guzzl-a-thon — New Year’s Eve. Will you start the new year with a massive hangover?

Hangovers are an aftershock of acute alcohol intoxication, meaning you get them while recovering from a serious bout of drinking. The symptoms, including headache, nausea, sensitivity to light and noise, lethargy, diarrhea and thirst, often strike people who are already wallowing in self-pity.

Physiology offers explanations: Alcohol causes dehydration. Liver enzymes convert ethanol to the more toxic acetaldehyde. Less glucose reaches the brain, adding to lethargy.

A preventable condition

Short of abstinence, there are ways to reduce hangover. Food, especially fats, slow alcohol absorption, if the food enters the stomach first. James Garbutt, a professor of psychiatry and alcoholism specialist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, suggests eating a meal before your first drink, and then nibbling through the evening.

Drinking a glass of water between each drink can also cut consumption.

The next morning, Garbutt advises treating the headache with ibuprofen (not aspirin or acetaminophen), and drinking water or a sports drink to restore fluids and electrolytes.
Beyond that, you are on your own: According to a 2005 review¹: “No compelling evidence exists to suggest that any conventional or complementary intervention is effective for preventing or treating alcohol hangover.”

Photo: As Heard From Mars

Think this bloke’s head will be on fire when he wakes from his stupor?

The science of the hangover

Still, The Why Files did track down some cool hangover science:

A good teaching tool? Because that morning of misery is a built-in disincentive to drink, hangovers seldom attract research funding. But a recent survey² of 303 college students chilled the notion that hangover is a good preventative like ice in a shot glass: “The students significantly overestimated the number of drinks it would take to vomit, have unwanted sexual experiences, experience hangovers, and black out in comparison with the actual self-reported number of drinks consumed the last time identical consequences were experienced.” If you tossed your cookies after five drinks, but thought you could absorb 10 next time, what have you learned?

Image from: Innocorp

Cops and health educators use these goggles to dissuade teens from drinking and driving.

Hangover scale: Filling a scientific gap, in 2007, researchers from Brown University³ crafted the “acute hangover scale” to measure the next-morning blues in American college students, recent graduates, and Swedish marine officers (all folks who know which way the bottle tilts). The researchers found that “Do you have a hangover?” was the best single question for identifying hangover, even better than questions about thirst and headache. Why bother? The new scale could help distinguish hangover from other addictive effects of alcohol, the authors explained.

Take the asparagus cure: In 2009, Korean scientists reported that components of asparagus can protect the liver against oxidative stress of alcohol. According to B.Y. Kim of Jeju National University, “These results provide evidence of how the biological functions of asparagus can help alleviate alcohol hangover and protect liver cells.” No word on whether asparagus has a drinking problem … and unfortunately, the leaves, not the shoots that we eat, offered the best protection.

You can’t detect a drunken fruitfly with a breathalyzer, but an inebriometer works just dandy.

Hangover is stupid! A large study⁴ from Scotland found that dumb kids — okay, 11-year-olds with a lower IQ — were more likely to have hangovers in middle age. So, you wonder? Because hangover is a good measure of binge drinking, “This finding may at least partially explain the link between early life IQ and adult risk of mortality ascribed to all causes, cardiovascular disease and, particularly, alcohol related morbidity,” the authors say.

Drunken fruitflies:

A recently discovered⁵ “hangover” gene in fruitflies increases their tolerance to alcohol (when measured, you can’t make this up, in the “inebriometer.”) Because alcohol tolerance is a risk factor for alcoholism, the gene may do something more than just cause headache. Do fruitflies feel queasy the morning after the night before?

The final word

If you drink, drink safe and drink smart. And never, ever overindulge and drive.

And happy New Year from The Why Files!

Urp.

– David J. Tenenbaum

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Terry Devitt, editor; S.V. Medaris, designer/illustrator; David J. Tenenbaum, feature writer; Amy Toburen, content development executive; Molly Simis, project assistant

Bibliography

1. Interventions for preventing or treating alcohol hangover: systematic review of randomized controlled trials, Max H Pittle et al BMJ. 2005 December 24; 331(7531): 1515-1518. doi: 10.1136/bmj.331.7531.1515. ↩
2. Do We Learn from Our Mistakes? An Examination of the Impact of Negative Alcohol-Related Consequences on College Students’ Drinking Patterns and Perceptions, Kimberly Mallett et al, J Stud Alcohol. 2006 March; 67(2): 269-276. ↩
3. The Acute Hangover Scale: A New Measure of Immediate Hangover Symptoms, Damaris J. Rohsenow et al, Addict Behav. 2007 June; 32(6): 1314-1320. Published online 2006 November 13. doi: 10.1016/j.addbeh.2006.10.001. ↩
4. Childhood IQ and life course socioeconomic position in relation to alcohol induced hangovers in adulthood: the Aberdeen children of the 1950s study, G David Batty et al, J Epidemiol Community Health. 2006 October; 60(10): 872-874. ↩
5. The hangover gene defines a stress pathway required for ethanol tolerance development, Henrike Scholz et al, Nature. 2005 August 11; 436(7052): 845-847. doi: 10.1038/nature03864. ↩
6. Hangover basics. ↩
7. What doesn’t work? ↩
8. Hangover cures around the world. ↩
9. A few too many. ↩

]]> http://whyfiles.org/2010/the-morning-after/feed/ 0 http://whyfiles.org/2010/maggots-leeches-parasitic-worms/ http://whyfiles.org/2010/maggots-leeches-parasitic-worms/#comments Thu, 23 Dec 2010 18:04:01 +0000 svmedaristwf http://whyfiles.org/?p=12829 Praise for parasites!

Talk about going to extremes: In 2004, an anonymous American man with ulcerative colitis chose to eat parasitic worms instead of having his diseased colon removed. He hoped that whipworms would provide a last-ditch biological balm for painful, bloody and frequent diarrhea, and more serious complications of colitis.

If his symptoms had not improved, you would not be reading about his sojourn through planet parasite. “It did work with this individual, he seemed to get better, not just once but twice,” says P’ng Loke, a parasite immunologist at New York University who studied the case.

Photo: Delorieux for Johann Gottfried Bremser

Imagine swallowing 2000 of these guys. You just might, if you were plagued with an inflammatory bowel disease.

In the same year that Mr. A swallowed those worm eggs, two other biological treatments gained Food and Drug Administration blessing as “medical devices”: leeches for removing excess blood after surgery, and maggots for cleaning difficult wounds.

Live organisms once played a bigger role in medicine, observes Ronald Sherman, a California doctor and maggot maven. “Before we had a good method for controlling syphilis, the bacterium was killed by inducing a fever, and one of the best methods was through malaria, carried by mosquitoes.”

Ready for some greatest hits from the ancient-but-modern realm of medicinal vermin?

Wondrous whipworms

Ulcerative colitis is a chronic bowel disease that afflicts up to one American in a thousand, apparently caused by some combination of inflammation and heredity. There is no cure. To prevent holes in the colon and other nasty outcomes, the bowel is often removed — a treatment that is also used for Crohn’s, the other major inflammatory bowel disease.

Photo: Uma Mahadevan, UCSF

Mr. Anonymous’s colon has a heavy infestation with whipworms, which are damaging the intestinal walls. Could that bleeding be a good thing?

In 2003, Mr. Anonymous was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, and in 2004, he went to Thailand and ate 500 eggs of Trichuris trichiura, a parasitic helminth worm, and then 1,000 more.

The symptoms abated, and when they returned in 2008, Mr. A, who’s now 35, slurped 2,000 more whipworm eggs, and again his symptoms receded.

There is some support for the idea that parasitic worms can help with ulcerative colitis. Whipworms infest almost a billion people around the world, and colitis is scarce in infected regions. Animal tests, and one human trial¹ suggest that parasitic worms can help with ulcerative colitis.

This story of salvation courtesy of planet parasite might be dismissed as another tall tale told over a tall goblet of organic wheat-grass at the Health-4-All-Spa, except that Mr. A came under the scrutiny of medical experts² eager to explore the effect of parasites on one ulcerated colon.

Although eating worm eggs twice reduced the symptoms, one person does not constitute scientific proof, says Loke, a parasite expert. “The question is whether it would work for everyone, and for whom it would do more harm than good; that’s what we worry about.”

Image: Kimberley Evason, UCSF

Stained Trichuris trichiura eggs inside a worm from the ulcerative colitis patient who infected himself with these whipworms.

Whipped into shape?

The study did pinpoint a mechanism of help, and surprisingly, it was not, as expected, via a dampening the immune system. “When we analyzed this patient, we started thinking that the protection may be more related to restoring mucus production,” Loke says.

Mucus protects the intestinal lining from bacteria and other dangers, and Loke and his colleagues think the worms accelerated activity in genes involved in producing mucus, through a stimulating chemical called IL 22.

A second benefit probably came from faster growth of cells lining the intestine, Loke added. “We know from mouse studies of Trichuris that the mechanism of expelling the parasite from the gut involves a combination of turning over epithelial cells so worms will get sloughed off, and an increase in mucus production.”

Immunology still matters, he says, but it may be that the worms are triggering a protective immune response rather than immune suppression.

Before worms could be considered a treatment for ulcerative colitis, “we hope to understand the mechanism a bit better,” says Loke. “In the ideal situation, we’d like to activate this response without using the worms themselves.”

Amen.

Photo: Professor David B. Fankhauser, University of Cincinnati Clermont College.

Goblet cells (arrow) in the intestinal lining create protective mucus. Increased mucus production could explain how whipworms treat ulcerative colitis.

Worms v. asthma

There’s been some hope that regulating the immune system could help with asthma, but the improvements in patients in a clinical trial³ of hookworms were, disappointingly, not statistically significant.

A 5-centimeter wound

Rollover to see effects of maggot treatment

BEFORE: After 18 months of conventional treatment, this wound was infected with dangerous methicillin-resistant staph aureus (MRSA) and covered with a thick layer of a dying tissue called slough.

AFTER: Six days later, after three maggot treatments, the same wound is free of slough and rich in granulation tissue, which supports healing and scar formation. MRSA could not be detected. All credit to those creepy-crawly maggots in the middle!

Evidence Based Complementary and Alternate Medicine⁴ and Oxford University Press (creative commons license)

But 13 of the 16 patients who swallowed hookworms decided not to get de-wormed afterwards, which suggests some perceived benefit, admits study author John Britton, in the division of epidemiology and public health at the University of Nottingham (United Kingdom). “We weren’t able to measure anything objective; hence the implication that larger, longer (and simpler) trials are needed.”

If you are tempted by do-it-yourself worm treatment for asthma, Britton has simple advice: “Don’t. There’s no evidence that it works.”

Both the benefits and the risk remain to be documented, says Loke, who tracked Mr. Anonymous, “and we don’t understand that fully. Worms can cause symptoms of colitis” and in the case of Mr. A, “are causing damage to the gut. But we think the gut is activating a healing response against the worms, and one benefit of that is the side effect of helping colitis.”

Marvelous maggots

While people have long used live organisms for medical purposes, many trace the scientific foundations of maggot therapy to World War I, when surgeon William Baer observed that maggot-infested wounds were often the cleanest and quickest to heal.

Photo: Alvesgaspar

Baby animals usually are cuter than the adults, but nobody told the green bottle fly!

In 1929, Baer reported complete success after treating 21 bone infections with maggots, and fly larvae quickly gained acceptance for wound treatment. But when antibiotics became widespread in the 1940s, healing became simply a matter of sprinkling a magic powder, and maggots were forgotten.

With diabetes becoming epidemic, and with so many bacteria immune to antibiotics, maggot use is again on the upswing. One key use is treating foot ulcers: slow-healing sores that affect about 15 percent of people with diabetes, and force 70,000 amputations each year in the United States.

Maggots are usually used to clean wounds, but they have many capabilities:

Removing dead tissue, using their raspy exterior as biotic sandpaper

Secreting enzymes that break down proteins in the diseased tissue, which the maggot then ingests

Improving oxygen supply to the wound

Killing bacteria — In one German study⁵, maggot secretion was as deadly as antiseptic

Attacking biofilms that protect bacteria from immune and antibiotic attack A 2010 study⁶ showed that fluids from the blowfly Lucilia sericata caused a “complete breakdown” in biofilm, allowing two antibiotics to kill Staphylococcus aureus bacteria.

Since Baer’s time, the common green-bottle fly, Phaenicia sericata, has been the preferred medical maggot, because it devours dead tissue, but not living flesh. Flies must be sterilized before use, and because the eggs quickly hatch into larvae (maggots), air-shipment is necessary, says Ronald Sherman, laboratory director of maggot-maker Monarch Labs.

The healing never stops

Sherman says he became interested in blending entomology and medicine when he read about Baer during medical school. “I was always interested in medical entomology, the intersection of health and insects, but usually that was in the context of insects that cause disease. I was also interested in the beneficial uses of insects.”

As investigations in maggot therapy started to ramp up the 1980s, he recalls a “huge wave of resistance [that] was not all due to revulsion” at the thought of hosting insects.

Part of the problem was resistance to change, he says, especially “When that change is associated with these negative, emotional connotations: death, flies, an unhygienic environment.”

Some resistance, he says, came from doctors “who saw that patients were lining up for [maggot] treatment. People … were canceling amputation surgeries … just to give maggot therapy a try!” According to Sherman⁷, some studies show that maggots can “salvage” 40 to 50 percent of limbs and digits scheduled for amputation.

One study⁸ found that although 43 percent of patients had flies escaping from their wounds, and 19 percent eventually needed amputation, 89 percent would use maggots again.

Courtesy Ronald Sherman

A bottle of chemically sterilized maggots costs about $100, plus shipping. Because the adult flies can be infectious, they must be restrained with cheesecloth or a special-purpose dressing.

Flies on trial

Other studies are less definitive. For example, in a randomized trial⁹ of wounds published in 2009, larvae-infested leg wounds were more painful, and while maggots were better at cleaning, they did not hasten healing or reduce bacterial infections.

A review¹⁰ of randomized treatments for diabetic foot ulcers found that “one small trial suggested that larvae resulted in a more than 50 percent reduction in wound area compared with hydrogel.” (Hydrogels are new dressings that keep wounds moist.)

Why only “one small trial” for the common diabetic foot ulcers? Because the gold standard for selecting therapies requires that neither doctor nor patient know which treatment was used — but this “double-blind” is doubly difficult when the medical device is a mess of growing flies!

Sherman, who is a maggot entrepreneur as well as medical doctor, says maggot therapy ought no longer be considered a last resort. “Most clinicians come to it either because their patients, or they themselves, are at a dead end. Facing amputation, they’ve run out of options. Once they see what maggots can do, and recognize how simple, inexpensive, and relatively safe they are, they recognize that they don’t have to wait so long, and in the future will think about maggot therapy … before the wound has progressed, before the infection has progressed.”

Image: Rsabbatini

Leeching was standard practice until the mid-1800s. Leech saliva contains anesthetics, which could also explain why this lady is so cool, calm and collected with her slithery pals!

Maggot therapy is occurring “throughout the world,” Sherman says. “Twenty-four labs are producing medical grade maggots and providing them in 40 countries. In the United States alone, about 2,000 centers are regularly using maggot therapy. The treatments are included in textbooks, review articles on wound care and conferences.”

Leapin’ Leeches!

Leeches — bloodsucking aquatic worms — have been a part of medicine for at least 2,000 years. The Encyclopedia Britannica tells us that “Throughout most of Western history, leeching-or leechcraft-became such a common practice that a physician was commonly referred to as a ‘leech.’”

Modern-day “leeches” use leeches to drain excess blood after surgery. “The classic use is when a finger is reattached surgically,” says Kosta Mumcuoglu, a parasitologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “Even if the surgeon succeeds nicely in reattaching the arteries, they often have problems with the veins, so blood can enter the finger but not return to the body. Then it’s a short time until the blood in the finger coagulates and the patient loses the finger.”

Surgeons may try to improve circulation with further surgery or anti-coagulants like heparin, says Mumcuoglu, president of the International Biotherapy Society. But if circulation is still stuck, “The skin may start to turn brown or violet, and any time now, the finger is going to be lost.”

Courtesy Kosta Mumcuoglu, Hebrew University¹¹

After finger-reattachment surgery, leeches excess blood that would otherwise clot and kill the finger. Those white objects are holding the surgery tight. Children whose fingers have been caught in doors are major beneficiaries of this surgery, but snowblowers can also amputate fingers.

Evolution plays two contrasting roles in our story: To avoid bleeding to death, mammals have evolved a powerful “coagulation cascade” that clots blood outside blood vessels. Because clotting could be deadly to leeches, they, like their bloodsucking brethren the ticks, mosquitoes and vampire bats, have evolved anti-coagulants.

One chemical in leech saliva, for example, blocks thrombin, which helps platelets clump to start a blood clot.

Not only do leeches produce prodigious amounts of clot-blockers, but they also have chemicals that relax blood vessels, which contributes to their utility in surgery. In 2004, leeches garnered FDA approval as a “medical device.”

The chemicals in leech saliva, aided by some manual clot removal, ensure that the skin around a surgery will bleed for hours or days after leeching. Even though the patient may need a blood transfusion, after a few days, “new blood vessels are growing in the area, and the circulation becomes normal, and we have a good feeling that we have saved the finger,” Mumcuoglu says.

Medical care for the medicinal leech (ca. 1841¹²)

“Whenever any disease prevails amongst the leeches, (and it is always of an epidemic nature), [a leech expert] recommends us to separate the dead from the suffering and healthy, and place the latter in separate earthen jars; to about fifty leeches we should give three quarts of rain water of about a month’s standing, of a medium temperature, adding to it about two pints of charcoal: after three days, the water should be changed, but the charcoal may remain.”

Good to know. And when the little bloodsuckers get hungry…

Leeches also secrete anti-inflammatory compounds that are being tested against diseases linked to inflammation. In a randomized trial¹³ in Germany, four to six leeches, which attached for an average of 70 minutes, led to a significant decrease in pain of osteoarthritis of the knee after seven days, compared to the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac. Leech treatment also significantly improved stiffness, function and general arthritis symptoms, for the entire 91-day study.

In 2008, the same researchers¹⁴ found that leeches. when compared to diclofenac, produced significant benefits in pain, mobility and quality of life for osteoarthritis of the thumb.

Solution: Outsourcing?

Still, leeches may never regain their former medical prominence. In London, in 1846, “at least tens of millions of leeches” were imported each year. A reservoir in Norwich, one author¹⁵ wrote, “might at least aid in supplying the quantity needed for our own consumption, instead of being almost entirely dependant, as we at present are, on a foreign supply.”

Modern leeching also faces modern problems:

Leeches can carry bacterial and viral disease. A study¹⁶ of a delayed infection after breast reconstruction reported infection rates from 2.4 percent to 20 percent.

Leeches may wander away from the wound and bite somewhere else, although they can be “leashed” into place with surgical thread.

Spent leeches can be infectious, and should be humanely euthanized by dunking in high-concentration ethanol. (We knew you’d ask…)

A 2007 study¹⁷ found that medicinal leeches may actually be members of three species, which raises questions about their biology and may flout the FDA, which defines this medical device as Hirudo medicinalis and nada mas.

However, this last finding may be key to further progress, says Mark Siddall of the American Museum of Natural History, who led the group that identified three species. “This raises the tantalizing prospect of three times the number of anti-coagulants, and three times as many [other] biomedically important developments…”

Top: Hirudo medicinalis, the European medicinal leech. Bottom: Hirudo verbana, a related species, also used for leeching.

Photo: Andrei Utevsky

Did we forget what parasitologists call the “Yuck! factor”? Do patients squirm at the thought of attaching primitive bloodsuckers to their wounds? Generally not, says Mumcuoglu. “We have less problem with leeches than with maggots. We explain, ‘This is your last chance, if you don’t want to lose the finger, we have to try this.’ … Nobody has rejected the treatment.”

¹⁸

^{19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28}

Terry Devitt, editor; S.V. Medaris, designer/illustrator; David J. Tenenbaum, feature writer; Amy Toburen, content development executive; Molly Simis, project assistant

Bibliography

1. Trichuris suis therapy for active ulcerative colitis: A randomized controlled trial, Robert W. Summers et al, Gastroenterology Volume 128, Issue 4, April 2005, Pages 825-832. ↩
2. IL-22+ CD4+ T Cells Are Associated with Therapeutic Trichuris trichiura Infection in an Ulcerative Colitis Patient, M.J. Broadhurst et al, Science Translational Medicine, 1 Dec. 2010. ↩
3. Experimental hookworm infection: a randomized placebo-controlled trial in asthma. JR Feary et al, Clinical and experimental allergy, journal of the British Society for Allergy and Clinical Immunology, 40(2), 299-306, 2010. ↩
4. Maggot Therapy: The Science and Implication for CAM Part I-History and Bacterial Resistance, Yamni Nigam et al, Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2006 June; 3(2): 223-227. ↩
5. In vitro antibacterial activity of Lucilia sericata maggot secretions, Daeschlein G et al, Skin Pharmacol Physiol. 2007;20(2):112-5. Epub 2006 Dec 13. ↩
6. Combinations of maggot excretions/secretions and antibiotics are effective against Staphylococcus aureus biofilms and the bacteria derived therefrom, MJ van der Plas et al, J Antimicrob Chemother. 2010 May;65(5):917-23. Epub 2010 Feb 26. ↩
7. Maggot Therapy Takes Us Back to the Future of Wound Care: Ronald A. Sherman, Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology, Volume 3, Issue 2, March 2009 ↩
8. Maggot therapy and the ”Yuk” factor: An issue for the patient? Pascal Steenvoorde et al, Wound Repair and Regeneration, Vol. 13, NO. 3 ↩
9. Larval therapy for leg ulcers (VenUS II): randomised controlled trial, Jo C Dumville, et al, BMJ 2009;338:b773, doi:10.1136/bmj.b773. ↩
10. Debridement of diabetic foot ulcers, Edwards J, Stapley S. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2010 Jan 20;(1):CD003556. ↩
11. The use of the medicinal leech, Hirudo medicinalis, in the reconstructive plastic surgery, Kosta Y. Mumcuoglu, et al. The Internet Journal of Plastic Surgery. 2007. Volume 4 Number 2. ↩
12. A Treatise on the Medicinal Leech, Prov Med Surg J. 1841 June 12; 2(37): 210-211, PMCID: PMC2488764 ↩
13. Effectiveness of Leech Therapy in Osteoarthritis of the Knee, A Randomized, Controlled Trial, Andreas Michalsen, et al, Ann Intern Med. 2003;139:724-730. ↩
14. Effectiveness of leech therapy in women with symptomatic arthrosis of the first carpometacarpal joint: a randomized controlled trial, Michalsen A, et al, Pain. 2008 Jul 15;137(2):452-9. Epub 2008 Apr 14. ↩
15. On the Medicinal Leech: (Sanguisuga Officinalis, Sav.), Thomas Brightwell, Prov Med Surg J. 1846 September 9; 10(36): 428-430. ↩
16. Delayed leech-borne infection with Aeromonas hydrophilia in escharotic flap wound, Ardehali B et al, J Plast Reconstr Aesthet Surg. 2006;59(1):94-5. ↩
17. Diverse molecular data demonstrate that commercially available medicinal leeches are not Hirudo medicinalis, Mark E Siddall et al, Proc Biol Sci. 2007 June 22; 274(1617): 1481-1487. ↩
18. Worms, maggots and diabetes. ↩
19. Worms you don’t want. ↩
20. Worms and herbal medicines. ↩
21. Old medicine is new. ↩
22. Medicinal leeches. ↩
23. NOVA: leeches. ↩
24. National Library of medicine. ↩
25. Ulcerative colitis. ↩
26. Inflammatory bowel disease. ↩
27. Goblet cells. ↩
28. Kangaroo Care: Back-to-the-future medicine, minus the Yuk! factor. ↩

]]> http://whyfiles.org/2010/maggots-leeches-parasitic-worms/feed/ 0 http://whyfiles.org/2010/spider-silk-material-of-the-future/ http://whyfiles.org/2010/spider-silk-material-of-the-future/#comments Thu, 29 Jul 2010 19:22:08 +0000 svmedaristwf http://whyfiles.org/?p=8736 You can’t fight Mother Nature

Photo: Fiorenzo Omenetto

But you sure can copy her. That’s an engineering approach called biomimetics – the quest to exploit the three billion-year evolutionary process that has perfected structures and materials as strong, spare and sophisticated as the hawk’s eye and mother-of-pearl.

Now we read about progress in the effort to make artificial silk – the light, ultra-tough fiber produced by spiders and silkworms. Like plastic, silk is a polymer – a series of repeated structures that can be altered to produce different results.

Adhesives are an important component of silk. Here’s what remains when you remove the gum from the fibers of a silkworm cocoon.

Photo: Fiorenzo Omenetto

But unlike plastic, the sub-units in silk are proteins. And silk can’t be made in the lab – yet.

In fact, it’s not yet clear how silk is made inside silkworms and spiders. As silk is forming, its proteins are so dense that they should glom together before the animal can spin the silk fiber.

Because a glance at a spider’s web proves that silk is possible, biologists and engineers are exploring the chemistry and physics of silk production.

By controlling the acidity and flow of the liquid pre-silk, and using mechanisms that are presently mysterious, spiders and silkworms create a fiber that shames even Kevlar, the fiber that is blended with polymer for lightweight canoes and bullet-proof vests.

Silkworm photo: Ksionic, flickr. Inset: Fiorenzo Omenetto

Hard at work, Mother Nature’s biomedical engineers eat in preparation for spinning a silk cocoon. Inset: One silkworm cocoon contains hundreds of meters of continuous silk fiber.

Strong, ‘n silky?

In terms of tensile (pulling) strength, silk approaches high-tensile steel, and is one-quarter as strong as Kevlar. But if you bend Kevlar, it “will fail immediately,” says David Kaplan, a professor of biomedical engineering at Tufts University.

Image courtesy of Materials Science & Engineering, Michigan Technological University.

Kevlar fiber may have more pulling strength than silk, but silk still out-performs all synthetic materials because of its “Rambo factor.”

In contrast, silk excels in a quality called toughness – the Rambo factor, which combines tensile strength and flexibility. “Silk is really good at tensile strength and toughness, and you can’t emulate that with a synthetic material,” Kaplan says.

Silk has many other desirable properties, adds Kaplan, co-author of a review on silk technology being published in tomorrow’s Science. The silkworm’s silk cocoon must protect the developing moth against rain and other environmental perils, yet the moth must digest the cocoon as it emerges.

Photo: ben klocek

Can the green chemistry that made these silk fabrics also make medical miracles?

Silk can also be highly elastic. “To catch prey, the spider can throw the silk like a lasso, and it sticks so the spider can reel the prey back in.”

Courtesy of what Kaplan calls “a glue-like feature that holds the fibers together through a protein-protein interaction,” spider-web silk can also adhere to itself, and to vegetation.

Because spiders and silkworms are only distantly related, the genes for silk must have evolved several times, Kaplan says. “That’s a vote for the simplicity and utility of the system, which clearly provides an important survival function.”

Finally, these remarkable materials are made with the ultimate green chemistry, with neither heat nor toxic byproducts, and using only water as the solvent.

Medical miracle?

Silk has been used for surgical suturing since Egyptian times. But Kaplan and others envision using this ultra-tough, biodegradable material as a

* scaffold to hold stem cells to regenerate diseased tissues, such as bone, kidney and cartilage;

* container to introduce cells, drugs or growth factors; and

Photos: University of Akron

For sheer toughness, spider silk trumps such synthetic fibers as carbon fiber and Kevlar.

* an injectable goop of silk precursors and the appropriate drugs or cells which would transform into a gel state and deliver its cargo before slowly degrading.

In 2009, Serica Technologies, Inc., got Food and Drug Administration approval for a silk-based material to be used as a supportive mesh in soft-tissue repairs. (Serica has since been acquired by Allergan, Inc.)

If silk is so slick, can it be made in larger quantities with traditional, in-glass chemistry? Perhaps, but Kaplan is more excited about moving the silk genes into plants or animals, so biology can make the precursors, or possibly a finished silk fiber.

As mentioned, the study of silk illustrates how engineers can be inspired by biology. Seventy-five percent of silk is composed of just two amino acids, Kaplan says, yet “this material is unique. It can make incredibly strong, tough, interesting materials, and do it through a green process. I can’t imagine where you can get more interesting properties from a simpler system.”

David J. Tenenbaum

Related Why Files

Super spider silk.

Flax facts: earliest spinning found.

Small is beautiful nanotechnology meets biology.

Bibliography

Fact sheet on silkworms.

Brief history of silk.

Spider silk.

Rare spider silk at the American Museum of Natural History.

What is biomimicry?

EPA on green chemistry.

American Chemical Society’s Green Chemistry Institute

New Opportunities for an Ancient Material, Fiorenzo G. Omenetto and David L. Kaplan, Science, 30 July 2010.

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