"Cosmos" reboot to premiere this weekend

Having gone to school in Ithaca for almost three years now, I've noticed there's a lot of feelings for the late great Carl Sagan, who taught over at Cornell. He was on the board at the science museum I worked at, and their planet walk is named after him. (The museum also has Bill Nye narrating the walk when you call the number at each station, but that's aside the point.) Even though I'm not really directly involved with anything else he's done, it's a bit of a point of pride whenever I hear him brought up because it's the same area.

Upon hearing about the Cosmos reboot, I was happy not only for that reason but because we really really need something like the revolutionary documentary series from the 1980s to get us back on track.  It'll be hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, which is awesome, and even though the executive producer is also the mastermind behind the completely unrelated Family Guy series, Seth MacFarlane seems to be pretty serious about this series. In an interview with NYT, he said the original series meant a lot to him as a kid, as “Cosmos addressed questions that every human being has, whether they think about them on a mathematical level or just as a layman. It presented them in a wonderfully candy-coated way for those of us who are not scientists, and yet it didn’t dumb anything down.”

I think this is where the power of the show is going to be, bringing science to the masses in a friendly way. I know I say that a lot, especially considering that's what I want to do in life, but there's something different about a TV show. I don't want to say it's mindless because this sort of thing certainly isn't, especially with how Sagan and now deGrasse Tyson emphasize the spirit of urgency in our human condition, but the people who desperately need to be exposed to this kind of information are the people who aren't going to be willing to pick up a science magazine or read a book about it. Television reaches people in a different way, and those people who need to see this might be more apt to check it out this way.

And as a Firefly flan, I have to say this: Please don't screw this up, FOX.

Desert whales killed by algal blooms

This sounds about as ridiculous as the idea of aquatic sloths, but I promise both are true and both lived in South America. Thanks to the wonders of plate tectonics, there's a section of the Atacama Desert filled with fossils of marine mammals, including some pretty cool whale specimens; this is where the site's name, Cerro Ballena, comes from (it literally means "whale hill"). The site was uncovered in 2010 when construction workers were trying to build a road in the area, and researchers were able to go in to look at and eventually 3D image the fossils, as the time lapse below shows.


Some of the researchers were able to take this information to come up with a reasonable explanation for the extinction of all these animals in one place. The arrangement of the bones at Cerro Ballena showed that the animals, including whales, seals, and the aforementioned aquatic sloth had all died at sea and washed up on shore. This mimicked another event from the late '80s in which 14 humpback whales died from an algal bloom.

Before you ask, no, it wasn't like the algae formed a giant, amoeba-like mass that strangled the whales. Rather, the mechanism at work here is that of bioaccumulation. A surplus of nutrients can create an algal bloom, and certain types of algae produce neurotoxins, which are obviously bad. Going up the food chain, the problem gets exponentially worse: in the case of a baleen whale, each krill it eats might only have a few units of toxin, but these animals eat a LOT of krill, so the toxin adds up pretty quickly. A slightly different process occurs in top predators: krill might have 1 unit of toxin, a small fish may eat 10 krill, a larger fish may eat 10 small fish, and you get the picture.

So far, this seems to be the most reasonable. A tsunami would've beached a lot more than just big animals, and disease wouldn't have beached so many different types of animals.

Dairy aficionado answers cheese FAQs

I love cheese. I like a lot of foods, but cheese is definitely up there on the list of things that the loss of which would make me very sad. We even have an entire drawer in our fridge dedicated to it: I have string cheese for snacking, sprinkle cheese (or as you adults call it, shredded cheese) for pasta and such, a big hunk of Parmesan for when I feel like being fancy and whipping out the microplane, and even the crappy cheese food slices that aren't technically cheese but are perfect for egg sandwiches.

My own adoration aside, there's now a book all about the science behind one of the best foods ever. USDA research chemist Michael Tunick wrote The Science of Cheese last year, and he wrote a small piece for Wired with a few cheese FAQs he's gotten throughout his career. Here are a few from his list:

• Why is cheese yellow? The plants that cows eat contain carotenoids, which are the pigment compounds that make carrots orange. During the transfer from diet to milk, carotenoids latch onto fat: cheese is yellow because the fat content is high enough. Milk isn't yellow because there isn't enough fat and therefore not enough carotenoids. Fun fact: this only works in cows; goats, sheep, and other dairy animals convert their carotenoids to vitamin A, so their milk and subsequent dairy products are white.
• Can lactose intolerant people eat cheese? Actually, yes. Most lactose is removed from cheese during the manufacturing and aging processes. The mutation leading to lactose digestion arose in Europe between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago, likely as a way to allow people access to vitamin D considering the low sunlight levels, but the majority of the world's population (~65%) is lactose intolerant, especially outside Europe and northern Africa. 

  

  Picture from J.P. Lon on Wikimedia Commons

• Why are some cheeses made in specific places? For some places, there's actually a law preventing certain types of cheeses being made in other areas. I remember watching a special on the Travel Channel about a race in England where they throw a wheel of Double Gloucester down a really steep hill and have participants run down to catch it. It was a pretty big deal, not only because a lot of people get injured each year rolling down a hill that I want to say had a 90% grade on one part, but also because Gloucester cheese is only made in that area. Roquefort, Brie, Emmental, and other cheeses are also only made in their namesake area, and one of the banks in the Emilia-Romagna area uses their parmesan-reggiano cheese as collateral for loans.
• And finally, can you make cheese from breast milk? Apparently this was a very common question that Tunick received, and the answer is no because there's not enough protein in general, let alone casein, which is the protein involved in forming curds.

FDA considering technique for three-parent embryos

I'm pretty sure I've discussed chimerism on here before (I know I've at least talked about mosaicism), but in case I haven't, the idea has nothing to do with Frankenorganisms created by smushing bits of other animals together. A genetic chimera is an organism that has collections of cells with at least 2 different sets of DNA. We get half of our DNA from one parent and half from the other, but normally all of our cells get the same "mom set" and the same "dad set," so instead a chimera has more than one "mom set" and more than one "dad set". Usually this happens when two eggs are fertilized by separate sperm and later fuse, creating an individual with some cells with "mom set A" and "dad set A" from the first fertilized egg and other cells with "mom set B" and "dad set B" from the second.

Currently, the FDA is mulling over a technique for test-tube embryos that involves a sort of chimerism in the sense that the embryo produced would have three parents. This would be achieved by taking just the mitochondria from a donor egg, replacing the mother's egg mitochondria with those of the donor, and then fertilizing the egg and continuing on as normal for in-vitro. It's not quite as obvious a chimera because all that's being added from the third parent is a set of organelles, but mitochondrial diseases are a pretty big problem considering they control energy production. They also house their own DNA, so these diseases are passed on from mother to child. As such, being able to replaced genetically faulty mitochondria in an otherwise healthy egg cell would be a huge help for the child later in life.

What I find interesting is the amount of backlash this is facing. Anything involving embryos is going to get religious groups riled up. Is it natural? Well, no. (Of course, "natural" is a stupid word to begin with, but that's aside the point.) But technically at the point of the swap, the egg isn't even fertilized yet, so you're in no way harming any sort of embryonic form, and this is a procedure that could save kids who would've otherwise inherited these mitochondrial diseases a lot of hassle later on. The other fear is that if we can "tweak" DNA like this, scientists will abuse this to create designer babies by only taking the best DNA from however many parents. I'm pretty sure that's not how it works. This is only dealing with a very small subset of DNA that isn't even inherited in the same way that the rest is, so the mechanism is completely different.

I know this won't get far with all the fear mongering going around, but if it were to go through, we'd be doing a lot of people a lot of favors.

ScienceOnline dedicates a weekend to revolutionizing science on the Internet

For my mobile and social media journalism class, we have to keep tabs on journalists and leaders in our beat, and because my beat is science (I know, shocker), I have a list of science people I follow on Twitter and Facebook and such. This week, I've seen a lot of the hashtag #scio14, so I decided to check it out, and I've decided that I needed to hitchhike my way down to Raleigh for ScienceOnline Together.  The event, which started today with tours of various science hotspots in the city, starts with sessions tomorrow and continues through Saturday.

The nonprofit that runs it, ScienceOnline, seeks to gather experts from around the field of science communication (teachers, journalists, researchers, etc) to talk about how to best get their ideas out online. This weekend's event was started in 2007 and has since branched out to additional conferences that cover more specific parts of science communication, such as the brain, climate, and a teen conference. They also run ScienceSeeker, an aggregator of science news and blogs; their current tally is at more than 1,200 sites.

In addition to all the silliness, sass, and snark I'm getting via Twitter from the event (Discover Mag blogger Kyle Hill is particularly fun to follow), I'm enjoying the lineup of sessions they have for this weekend. They have a few on specific topics such as women in science or non-English science communication, how to make science accessible to the average joe (and subsequently how to make the average joe think more scientifically), and how to utilize online resources for science and science communication. If that's not enough of an incentive, they also have breaks in which participants get together for games and even a costume gala.

Unfortunately for me, registration has been closed for a while, as they only take about 450 people. There's also the issue of my lack of money (it's 350 bucks), transportation (more money I don't have), plus that thing called class. But if I can get in next year…

Tequila byproducts can be used to create plastic

One of the major issues we face today is that of waste. We produce things more quickly than we can take care of the trash, and in a society that embraces planned obsolescence, more of that waste is trickier to dispose of safely. Even waste from food production is becoming a problem, but the tequila industry at least may have an option for their future.

A study (heads-up: it's in Spanish) from the University of Guadalajara found that the bacterium Actinobacillus succinogenes, found in cow stomachs among other places, can take the sugars from byproducts of tequila production to create succinic acid. This might not sound too exciting until you know that succinic acid is one of the components of biodegradable plastic. All cells produce it, but it's normally derived chemically from petroleum when used to make plastic.

Model by Ben Mills from Wikimedia Commons via public domain

The main obstacle here is one of scaling: Actinobacillus succinogenes can only produce 20 grams of succinic acid from one liter of tequila production waste, and the lab that did the study only has about 3 liters of acid from their trials. However, plans to increase the volume are in the works once scientists can recreate the small-scale environment in a larger container to support production; a separate plant in Barcelona is already working on industrial-scale succinic acid production.

If this can get off the ground on a reasonable scale, I think this is a great idea. I'm not sure of exact numbers regarding the self-sustainability of it, but if the tequila industry were to at least produce some of their bottles with plastic made from their own byproducts, that would be pretty awesome. That's less plastic that has to be created from petroleum, which is something we have enough problems with already, plus it's biodegradable, which completes the cycle.

STAP cell study to go under investigation

You may remember the post I wrote on Feb 3 about the group of Japanese researchers who turned somatic cells into stem cells by treating them with acid. It turns out that the RIKEN Center  is conducting an investigation on this study because subsequent trials have proved inconclusive in recreating the data.

(Sorry for the link dumping there, but all of the links were related to that one sentence.)

As someone who has gone through many labs in school, I fully understand not being able to recreate the results of a study. Especially in middle and high school, carelessness or other mistakes are usually the culprit, but even correctly measured and conducted experiments flop; sometimes I'm convinced they don't work just to spite you. I've even been in at least one lab in which everyone's experiments flopped for no reason. However, it's unlikely that so many that are professionally done would have come up with inconclusive results.

One of the tenets of research is that it's replicable, and this not-so-good track record is a little troubling. Did they leave out part of the procedure? Were there different measurements? Was there an issue of translation? I imagine these are all things that the RIKEN Center will look into, but the crowdsourcing aspect could also help rule this out. I'm going to avoid a cooking analogy here because I don't really want to associate food with test-tube mice, but the scientists checking this out on their own could pretty easily tweak different material amounts or types to see if the changes produce something worth while.