Eideard

Justin Meyer, right, with Devin Dobias

Viruses regularly evolve new ways of making people sick, but scientists usually do not become aware of these new strategies until years or centuries after they have evolved. In a new study…however, a team of scientists at Michigan State University describes how viruses evolved a new way of infecting cells in little more than two weeks.

The report is being published in the midst of a controversy over a deadly bird flu virus that researchers manipulated to spread from mammal to mammal. Some critics have questioned whether such a change could have happened on its own. The new research suggests that new traits based on multiple mutations can indeed occur with frightening speed.

The Michigan researchers studied a virus known as lambda. It is harmless to humans, infecting only the gut bacterium Escherichia coli. Justin Meyer, a graduate student in the biology laboratory of Richard Lenski, wondered whether lambda might be able to evolve an entirely new way of getting into its host…

Mr. Meyer set up an experiment in which E. coli made almost none of the molecules that the virus grabs onto. Now few of the viruses could get into the bacteria. Any mutations that allowed a virus to use a different surface molecule to get in would make it much more successful than its fellow viruses. “It would have a feast of E. coli,” Dr. Lenski said.

The scientists found that in just 15 days, there were viruses using a new molecule — a channel in E. coli known as OmpF. Lambda viruses had never been reported to use OmpF before…

To see if this result was just a fluke, Mr. Meyer ran his experiment again, this time with 96 separate lines. The viruses in 24 of the lines evolved to use OmpF…

The new experiment provides a surprising glimpse at how easily viruses can evolve entirely new traits — and thus give rise to new diseases…

…The chances that a single virus would acquire so many mutations at once are certainly small. In the case of lambda viruses, Mr. Meyer estimates the chance of all four mutations arising at once is roughly one in a thousand trillion trillion.

Yet the lambda viruses repeatedly acquired all four mutations in a matter of weeks. “There’s this thinking that it all has to come together at once,” Dr. Lenski said. “But that’s just not how evolution works.”

Ready for a remake of The Andromeda Strain? Only this time it will be a documentary.

The historic seizure of 15 tons of pure methamphetamine in western Mexico, equal to half of all meth seizures worldwide in 2009, feeds growing speculation that the country could become a world platform for meth production, not just a supplier to the United States.

The sheer size of the bust announced late Wednesday in Jalisco state suggests involvement of the powerful Sinaloa cartel, a major international trafficker of cocaine and marijuana that has moved into meth production and manufacturing on an industrial scale…

Jalisco has long been considered the hub of the Sinaloa cartel’s meth production and trafficking. Meanwhile, meth use is growing in the United States, already the world’s biggest market for illicit drugs.

The haul could have supplied 13 million doses worth over $4 billion on U.S. streets.

The Sinaloa cartel, headed by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, is equipped to produce and distribute drugs “for the global village,” said Antonio Mazzitelli, the regional representative of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

“Such large-scale production could suggest an expansion … into Latin American and Asian markets,” Mazzitelli said…

There were no people found on the ranch or arrests made…

Golly. There’s a surprise.

A shortage of Adderall, which is used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, shows little sign of easing as manufacturers struggle to get enough active ingredient to make the drug and demand climbs.

Adderall, a stimulant, is a controlled substance, meaning it is addictive and has the potential to be abused. The Drug Enforcement Administration tightly regulates how much of the drug’s active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) can be distributed to manufacturers each year…

Increasingly that estimate is coming into conflict with what companies themselves say they need to meet demand for the drug, which is reaching all-time highs. In 2010, more than 18 million prescriptions were written for Adderall, up 13.4 percent from 2009, according to IMS Health, which tracks prescription data…

‘All-time highs” – A deliberate choice of words?

ADHD is one of the most common childhood disorders. An average of 9 percent of children between the ages of five and 17 are diagnosed with ADHD per year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Symptoms include difficulty staying focused, hyperactivity and difficulty controlling behavior. If they are not properly medicated, children with ADHD may act out and be held back in class; adolescents might engage in impulsive, risky behavior; adults are at greater risk of being fired from their jobs…

And living in a nation that chooses symptomatic treatment over any other, we are all required to nod our bobbleheads and worry about a shortage of drugs for the next generation of junkies.

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Traditional playgrounds which teach children about risk and danger are being reintroduced after research found that they aid development.

Climbing frames, monkey bars, sand and water features have been replaced with sterile play areas in recent years amid overzealous health and safety fears.

Councils removed features such as paddling pools sand pits and fitted rubber mats in a bid to avoid costly litigation. But experts believe that the opportunity to assess potential danger and react to risk in the playground helps children make decisions in later life.

South Somerset district council has revised its play strategy and has granted approval for more traditional playgrounds which including stepping logs and wooden forts.

Adrian Moore, the council’s play and youth facilities officer, told the Sunday Times: “Playgrounds are the nursery slopes for real life. If we don’t help children differentiate between acceptable and unacceptable risk, we are failing them.

“Instead of eliminating it, let’s embrace it. In a playground, learning to judge speed, movement and distance stands you in good stead when you master other vital but dangerous skills, such as riding a bike or crossing the road.”

Ellen Sandseter, a professor of psychology at Queen Maud University in Norway, wrote in the journal Evolutionary Psychology: “Children must encounter risks and overcome playground fears, monkey bars and tall slides are great.

“They approach thrills and risks in a progressive manner. Let them encounter these challenges from an early age and they will master them through play over the years.”

Good grief. I don’t think the kids ever worry about danger.

Mommies and daddies are always ready to rush out in overprotective mode. The best thing they can do is ban parents from anywhere they can watch their children playing.

Click to enlarge

Scientists have produced what they say is the first complete map of how the ice moves across Antarctica.
Built from images acquired by radar satellites, the visualisation details all the great glaciers and the smaller ice streams that feed them…

It should aid the understanding of how the White Continent might evolve in the warmer world being forecast by climatologists.

“This is like seeing a map of all the oceans’ currents for the first time. It’s a game changer for glaciology,” said lead author Dr Eric Rignot. “We are seeing amazing flows from the heart of the continent that had never been described before”…

The map incorporates billions of radar data points collected between 1996 and 2009 by satellites belonging to Europe, Canada and Japan.

Ice drains from the interior via huge glaciers that calve icebergs into the sea…Ice velocities on the new map range from just few cm/year near places where the ice divides into different paths, to km/year on fast-moving glaciers and the ice shelves that float out from the edges of the continent.

RTFA for history and details. Interesting stuff.

Click on photo for map

China is proposing to build a rail link to rival the almost century-old Panama canal, the Colombian president has said. The 220km rail connection would connect Cartagena, on the northern Atlantic coast of Colombia, with its Pacific coast – making it easier for China to export its goods through the Americas and import raw materials such as coal.

“It’s a real proposal … and it is quite advanced,” Juan Manuel Santos told the Financial Times. Although the link would be almost three times the length of the canal that cuts through neighbouring Panama, the president added: “The studies [the Chinese] have made on the costs of transporting per tonne, the cost of investment, they all work out…

Panama also has a rail route, built almost 60 years before the canal, which is more expensive than the waterway for shippers but faster…

A shipping executive told the newspaper that moving containers on to and off the link at either end would probably cost $200 each in addition to $100 fees for the rail transport. In comparison, fees for the canal are around $100 a container…

Well, that’s one estimate. Any others?

The ministry of foreign affairs in Beijing confirmed the proposal.

The project is reportedly one of several Chinese proposals to improve transport links with Asia. The most advanced is a $7.6bn plan to build a 791km railway and expand the port of Buenaventura, on Colombia’s Pacific coast. It would allow up to 40m tonnes of freight a year to be carried from Colombia to its ports and promote the export of coal to China, where demand is rising fast.

Modern container ships get unloaded and loaded faster and more efficiently every year. I don’t see any new technology improving transit via the Panama Canal. All that’s happening there is widening and tweaking the system to allow larger vessels through. None of that would be a problem for the dry land solution proposed in Columbia.

A new meta-analysis study conducted by Syracuse University Professor Stephanie Ortigue is getting attention around the world. The groundbreaking study, “The Neuroimaging of Love,” reveals falling in love can elicit not only the same euphoric feeling as using cocaine, but also affects intellectual areas of the brain. Researchers also found falling in love only takes about a fifth of a second…

Results from Ortigue’s team revealed when a person falls in love, 12 areas of the brain work in tandem to release euphoria-inducing chemicals such as dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline and vasopression. The love feeling also affects sophisticated cognitive functions, such as mental representation, metaphors and body image.

The findings beg the question, “Does the heart fall in love, or the brain?”

“That’s a tricky question always,” says Ortigue. “I would say the brain, but the heart is also related because the complex concept of love is formed by both bottom-up and top-down processes from the brain to the heart and vice versa. For instance, activation in some parts of the brain can generate stimulations to the heart, butterflies in the stomach. Some symptoms we sometimes feel as a manifestation of the heart may sometimes be coming from the brain.”

Other researchers also found blood levels of nerve growth factor, or NGF, also increased. Those levels were significantly higher in couples who had just fallen in love. This molecule involved plays an important role in the social chemistry of humans, or the phenomenon ‘love at first sight.’ “These results confirm love has a scientific basis,” says Ortigue…

RTFA. Fascinating research. Why try to keep romanticism divorced from science?

In fact, the sense of adventure, quest for knowledge, newer and greater understanding of life and living seems to me to be one of the romantic undertakings there could be. Dullards are the ones afraid of real science.

William Cecil, 21-year-old computer science major and chemistry minor at the University of Central Florida, hosted a cache of explosive chemicals and a drug den.

Investigators on Wednesday found jugs of corrosive acids and other chemicals inside Cecil’s east orange County apartment. They also seized cocaine, Ecstasy and oxycodone tablets, methamphetamine and dozens of glass beakers and flasks used to ‘cook’ meth.

Cecil admitted to Orange County sheriff’s deputies that he used the compounds to make amphetamine, another controlled drug. He also rattled off a tally of substances he kept under his bed that read like the inventory list of a chemical supply company…

The apartment manager told investigators she acted on the call [from Cecil's roommate] by entering Cecil’s apartment with the leasing manager. She photographed chemicals in the kitchen, including a jug labeled ‘methanol’ and ‘flammable’ as well as burners, frozen bottles and glass lab equipment.

She returned to the leasing office and searched for the chemicals on a computer and realized they were used to “cook crystal methamphetamine,” the arrest report shows.

This is the third case this year of a drug-related arrest involving UCF students.

No extra credit for initiative?

A yellow submarine has helped to solve a puzzle about one of Antarctica’s fastest-melting glaciers, adding to concerns about how climate change may push up world sea levels.

The robot submarine, deployed under the ice shelf floating on the sea at the end of the Pine Island Glacier, found that the ice was no longer resting on a subsea ridge that had slowed the glacier’s slide until the early 1970s.

Antarctica is key to predicting the rise in sea levels caused by global warming — it has enough ice to raise sea levels by 57 meters (187 ft) if it ever all melted. Even a tiny thaw at the fringes could swamp coasts from Bangladesh to Florida…

West Antarctica’s thaw accounts for 10 percent of a recently observed rise in sea levels, with melting of the Pine Island glacier quickening, especially in recent decades, according to the study led by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Loss of contact with the subsea ridge meant that ice was flowing faster and also thawing more as sea water flowed into an ever bigger cavity that now extended 30 km beyond the ridge. The water was just above freezing at 1 degree Celsius…

Adrian Jenkins, lead author at BAS, said the study raised “new questions about whether the current loss of ice from Pine Island Glacier is caused by recent climate change or is a continuation of a longer-term process that began when the glacier disconnected from the ridge.”

Research that provides more data, better directed conclusions is always welcome. Welcomed, that is, by scientists and those who would make decisions about life and politics based on scientific understanding.

German police detained a nightclub reveler they caught trying to snort amphetamines off the top of their unmarked patrol car.

The 26-year-old began lining up the powdered drugs on the roof of the car in a disco car park, when the two police officers surprised him, a Nuremberg police spokesman said on Tuesday.

The man had no idea the normal looking vehicle belonged to the police, and it was coincidence that the officers — who were walking by their parked car — discovered him just as he was about to take the drugs.

“He’s got horrible luck,” said Bert Rauenbusch, police spokesman in the southern German city.

Yeah, that’s one of the things you could say about him.