Learn to Love Your Runny Nose

Mere words cannot capture the importance of a clean nose to me. No matter where I go, I am always equipped with some kind of tissue paper to blow my nose with. To me, a runny nose is like a runny faucet, I must fix it as fast as possible and I cannot relax until I do. So, naturally, I don't relax at all when it's pollen season. Even though I arm myself with Kleenex and Claritin, I still find myself at the mercy of my relentless runny nose.

As our society has evolved, we have emphasized more and more the importance of cleanliness, which has caused us to hate our mucus, treating it as an imperfection that needs to be removed. Allergies, whether from pollen or from a certain type of food, are seen as improper reactions of our immune system that are not necessary. Researchers, however, have begun to look at allergies in a different light altogether, and I don't mean literally, because that is disgusting.

Ruslan Medzhitov, an immunobiologist at Yale, believes that allergic reactions are the body's way of informing you that you are somewhere, or doing something, that is hazardous to your health. In his research, for example, Medzhitov found that the cells involved in allergic responses can degrade and detoxity snake venom. He has also found that when people have allergic reactions to ticks, the reaction prevents the tick from actually attaching itself. These defense mechanisms are distinct from the other responses the body uses to defend itself from internal attackers.

So why do some people have allergic reactions and other do not? Medzhitov would reason that people who have allergic reactions have them because they lack in other defense mechanisms.

Will Organic Food Satisfy Stomachs Worldwide?

With so many advances in medicine and technologies prolonging our lifespans, we are populating our world faster than ever. The other day my mother told me that when she was my age, there was somewhere in the range of 3 to 4 billion people living on this planet. In a few decades, that number has DOUBLED, as we now have over 7 billion people on Earth with the number steadily growing. As this number grows and grows, many smart minds are already at work trying to find a way to produce enough food to feed all of these people.

So far, global agriculture has been responsible for keeping our livestock fed and our stomachs satisfied. This type of agriculture has come with its disadvantages, however, as it is responsible for overtaking about 55% of our world's temperate climates, killing off species right and left as it goes. Because of these unsatisfactory alterations to our environment, people are now turning to organic farming to produce food without as much impact to the environment.

Environmental scientists at Montreal's McGill University, as well as the University of Minnesota analyzed 66 studies that compared the effectiveness of 34 crop species as both organic yields and conventional yields. Though the scientists found that organic farming had a much lower yield than conventional farming when it came to the major crops (i.e. corn, wheat), organic agriculture delivers only 5% less yield in crops and perennials such as alfalfa, beans, and fruit trees.

So, what method will allow us to increase our yield of organic crops? How about a whole lot of synthetic fertilizer!

Currently, farmers use synthetic fertilizer rich with nitrogen to help supplement the yield of their organic crops. This fertilizer is better at meeting the demand from crops during their growing season better than compost or manure. It's also quite good at causing the mouths of rivers to lose oxygen by encouraging algal blooms which then die and suck all of the oxygen out of the water surrounding it.

It seems as though we are caught in a place between needing to feed billions of mouths and needing to preserve our planet's fragile ability to support life.

Have all of our advances in medicine and nutrition caused our species to become too successful? While we strive to eliminate diseases and infant mortality, we have potentially created a very serious problem of overpopulation. Also, how can we hope to grow enough food without causing harm to our planet's environments? Unless we find a way to produce enough food, mass starvation will kick in at some point, and only powerful, developed countries will have a chance to afford the food needed to keep its population fed.

The original article can be found here.

Worming Our Way To The Origins of Our Brain

The human brain is perhaps the most perplexing and complicated instrument of the human body. Our brains not only help us with things that we think about, it also takes care of involuntary things while we are awake or asleep like breathing, Every day, a lot of us tend to take the utter brilliance and complexity of our brain for granted, when it is in fact the deciding factor in making us human. Our brain is a beautifully intricate and complex organ that allows us to be the most intelligent life form on the planet (at least to our knowledge).

So how does such an amazing instrument as the brain come about? This is the question numerous scientists seek to find an answer to.

The truth is, the earliest ancestors we evolved from did not even have brains, yet we still managed to develop one over the millions upon millions of years of evolution our species has undergone. Scientists have been unable to find very much evidence to support the origins of a larger, centralized brain, at least until a group of researchers looked upon the acorn worm.

Now, don’t get me wrong, these worms are absolutely brainless. They live their pathetic little existence buried in the deep-sea beds and have never seen the light of day (of course they are blind so that would not matter). What researchers are interested in in these worms is a set of signals in the genetic patterns of their developing larvae that are seemingly similar to the ones we use to construct our central nervous systems. This is science though, so the other scientists would be fools not to debate these findings on what could potentially be the early beginnings of the vertebrate brain.

The scientists who did not partake in this study raise several other points. Another idea on the origins of the brain include the composition of several simple structures that served different purposes to one central structure that served several purposes at once.

Alas, most researchers believe that the origin of our complex brains will most likely remain controversial as long as the evidence remains scant.  After all, you can only do so much with the fossilized remains of a 500-million-year-old soft-bodied invertebrate.

The original article can be found here.

Video Games Bad For Behavior?

Video games have become a hotly debated topic since their arrival in the 1970's with games like Pong and Pac-Man. Many people have launched campaigns against them, claiming they are responsible for promoting and glorifying violent behavior within the youth of America. These people claim that video games can be linked to increases in shootings and unhealthy brain patterns. So just how much damage do video games do towards behavior and/or thought processes?

Patrick Kierkegaard of the University of Essex, England, would argue that video games do little to no damage, at least relative to how they are portrayed by the media. After studying several research papers ranging from modern studies to studies in the 1980s that conclude that there is a correlation between video games and juvenile delinquency, as well as violent video games and regions of the human brain that are associated with aggression, Kierkegaard found that there is no obvious link between violent video games and bad behavior. As a matter of fact, he says, "violent crime, particularly among the young, has decreased dramatically since the early 1990s... while video games have steadily increased in popularity and use." He essentially finds research inconclusive and calls for a more detailed study of video games and their affects on behavior.

This inconclusiveness in the studies of video games irritates me on a personal level as I am a video game enthusiast. To blame someone's behavior on such a small portion of their life is irrational and does not take into account the countless variables around it that also influence a young person's behavior. Do I love video games? Absolutely! Do I consider myself more violent because of them? Not at all. Just because I enjoy playing out the stories of a dragon-slaying warrior, a thirteenth-century Arabic assassin, or an alien-slaying space engineer doesn't make me more violent and likely to go out and murder people. It's almost a non-issue with the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) we have established to set ratings on games as to what ages they are appropriate for. Are the games I play rated "M" for mature and intended for people over the age of 17? Yes. Did I play these games before I turned 17? I did not, my parents understood that those kinds of games were not meant for someone under 17, so I waited until I was of age and then purchased the games myself. Parents who let their young children play these kind of violent video games are the real problem here if there even is one, and that isn't even behavioral effects, it is just lazy parenting.

I chose this article because I find that there is a media bias on video games that does not allow for objective, clear studies or observations of the effects that these violent games have. Biased studies like this one, funded by the Center for Successful Parenting, an anti-video game group, are sadly some of the only studies being done on the effects of video games on our behavior. What I have found while playing video games is, like reading a book or watching a movie, it is another method of telling a story and an opportunity to escape to another world. Like everything, of course, it should be taken in moderation and regulated rather than just branded evil by parents who are unwilling to be responsible for their children's actions. I await the day that an impressive, peer-review, non-biased study emerges in the media that makes a compelling argument for or against video games affecting behavior. Until then, I will keep my controllers charged and my trigger-finger sharp.

The article this post is based off of can be found here.

Bite of the Conodonts

Scientists have discovered an extinct marine vertebrate with the sharpest teeth ever known. The conodont species, known as Wurmiella excavata, evolved circa 500 million years ago during the Precambrian eon and went extinct 200 million years ago. The Wurmiella excavata is said to have lived longer on Earth than other vertebrates, and were the first creatures to evolve teeth even though they did not possess jaws. These conodonts had teeth with tips 2 micrometers wide, which is 5% as wide as a human hair.

Researchers have used X-rays to create models of eight food-processing structures from the Wurmiella excavata in an attempt to discover how the teeth functioned. They compared the teeth with bat molars of a similar size, and found that, unlike mammals that use muscular force to break down their food, the conodonts used minuscule forces that were a result of their teeth's sharpness and the way they gnawed. Though sharp teeth can cause problems such as breaking more easily, the conodonts succeeded where other vertebrates failed in that they were able to re-sharper and repair their teeth.

Mark Purnell, a paleontologist at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, explained that conodonts "were the first vertebrates to 'experiment with... complex food-processing teeth", having developed slicing and interlocking crushing teeth millions of years before any other creature. Because of the abundance of conodont teeth in marine sedimentary rocks, the teeth provide a chance to test whether or not different species of vertebrates independently developed their teeth.

I chose this article because I think it is very important that we understand how these things evolved and came about. To be able to isolate a species as having the first teeth of any species can help us understanding how and why teeth came about. Perhaps through further cloning, a part of their DNA could be identified as being responsible for repairing teeth or some other function that we may find valuable.

Forest of Ashes

Though we have been able to learn some about the history of our planet through observations and recordings left behind by our ancestors, so much of Earth's history is shrouded in mystery and subsidized with speculation. One of the only ways we can find clues to the past is through fossilization, which is a rare occurrence and usually doesn't preserve something entirely. Now, however, scientists have been given the opportunity to look at an ecosystem literally millions of years old and see what it was like then.

298 million years ago, a volcanic eruption in what is now Inner Mongolia covered a forest ecosystem with a 39 inch thick layer of ash. Much like the well known story of Mount Vesuvius coating Pompeii in ash and preserving everything down to the shapes of the victims' bodies, this layer of ash essentially froze the forest in place. The ash layer and the eruption date to the early Permian Period, when the forming of the super continent Pangaea had begun.

Researchers examined three sites, 1,000 square meters in total, near Wuda China. University of Pennsylvania paleobotanist Hermann Pfefferkorn calls it "marvelously preserved" to the point where they can "find a branch with the leaves attached, and then ... then next branch and the next branch and the next branch" an so on. The tallest trees they found grew about 25 meters high or higher, and they also found tree ferns and a group of currently extinct trees known as Noeggerathiales that produced spores.

Having an ecosystem frozen in time and preserved like this for hundreds of millions of years is very rare and presents an opportunity to learn that should not be passed up. Researchers can continue to study this area and gain valuable knowledge as to what systems took place within this forest. Uniformitarianism states that "the past is the key to the present", so we should study the past in order to better understand the world we live in today. Studying this ecosystem and learning the complexities it holds to the best of our ability will provide valuable insight into a period of Earth's history that we simply don't know as much about as we would like to.

To see the original article, click here.

Curing the Blind

My last entry discussed the use of brain activity to predict words a person hears, and how that technology may one day be used to predict a person's imagined words. I recently found an article that I found to be both intriguing and also on the topic of improving life for those with handicapped senses.

Gene therapy has been recently used to restore vision for three women who were virtually blind. The women can now avoid obstacles, read large printed words, and recognize people by their faces. Researchers predict that therapy will work even more so in children and adolescents that have the same condition that causes blindness.

The operation on these three women worked just as well as the initial operation. The initial operation took place between the years 2008 and 2011, when Jean Bennet of the University of Pennsylvania's Mahoney Institute of Neurological Sciences and her partners used gene therapy to improve the vision of a dozen adults and children who were virtually blind. These 12 patients suffered from Leber's congenital amaurosis, or LCA, which is a rare inherited eye disease that destroys photoreceptors, light sensitive cells at the back of the eye in the retina, resulting in a lack of vision.

The treatment was developed with the understanding that the disorder caused blindness through genetic mutations in retinal cells. One of the mutated genes responsible for the disorder is RPE65. RPE65 is responsible for encoding an enzyme that helps break down retinol, a derivative of vitamin A, into a substance that is needed by photoreceptors to detect light and transmit signals to the brain. Mutated forms of RPE65 prevent the production of this enzyme in the retinal pigment epithelium, an area attached to the retina responsible for breaking down retinol.

In the initial study, Jean Bennett's coauthor Albert Maguire of Penn Medicine introduced a harmless virus that carried normal copies of RPE65 into an area of the retinal pigment epithelium. He introduced the virus into one eye of each patient. The retinal pigment epithelium then began copying normal RPE65, and the study was so successful that 6 out of the 12 patients were no longer legally blind. Recently, three of the women from the initial study were given the same treatment in their untreated eye, with identical results. The women showed an improvement in vision only 2 weeks after the treatment. Not only are the women's eyes more sensitive to light, their brains were also much more responsive to optical input. To the surprise of the researchers, the second treatment also improved the vision of the eye that was initially treated. They guess that visual cortex of the second treated eye bolsters the visual cortex of the initially treated eye.

I chose this article because I am enthralled by the medical field's strides towards helping people born with preexisting conditions that limit their sensory perception. While I often like to lay out the pros and cons for various advances in medicine, I don't see any cons to the ability to cure the blind. Further advances into this field could help treat people suffering from other forms of inherited blindness and improve the quality of life for millions of people.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=gene-therapy-blindness