Science

Mid-Week Update

Sting Operation
Three Panel Soul had a comic mentioning the scientific experiment that led to the confirmation of the cause of Irukandji syndrome, a really nasty reaction to the toxin of certain tiny jellyfish.

In 1964, Dr. Jack Barnes confirmed the cause of the syndrome to be due to a small box jelly, the Irukandji jellyfish (Carukia barnesi). In order to prove that the jellyfish was the cause of the syndrome, he captured one and deliberately stung himself, his son, and a local lifeguard, and observed the symptoms[3] It is suspected that other Cubozoa can cause Irukandji syndrome,[4] but only seven jellyfish have been positively identified (C. barnesi, Alatina cf. mordens, Carybdea alata, Malo maxima, Carybdea xaymacana, an as-yet unnamed ‘fire jelly’, and 1 other unnamed species).[5][1]

That's right. He used himself, his son, and a lifeguard as guinea pigs, hoping to induce a syndrome that had cropped up recently in a few coastal communities.

He had to know, however, that if he was successful...

Most stings occur during the summer wet season in December-January. The sting itself is often barely noticed, but the symptoms gradually become more intense in the following 5 to 120 minutes (30 minutes on average). Irukandji syndrome includes an array of systemic symptoms including severe headache, backache, muscle pains, chest and abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting, sweating, anxiety, hypertension, and pulmonary edema.[3][9] Symptoms generally abate in 4 to 30 hours, but may take up to a week to resolve completely.[4]

and

Similarly to other box jellyfish, first aid consists of flushing the area with vinegar to neutralize the tentacle stinging apparatus. There is no antivenom; treatment is largely supportive, with analgesia being the mainstay of management. Antihistamines may be of benefit for pain relief,[10] but most cases require intravenous opioid analgesia. Fentanyl or morphine are usually chosen. Pethidine (aka meperidine in U.S. (Demerol)) should be avoided, as large doses are often required for pain relief and in this situation significant adverse effects from the pethidine metabolite norpethidine may occur.[11]

That's right; it's so painful that opiates are necessary. He had to know this going in.

It gets better; it is, in fact, one of the most painful things you can suffer and LIVE.

The severity of the pain from an Irukandji jellyfish sting is apparent in the 2005 Discovery Channel documentary Killer Jellyfish on Carukia barnesi, when two Australian researchers (Jamie Seymour and Teresa Carrette) are stung. Even under the "maximum dose of morphine" Teresa remarked that she "wished she could rip her skin off", and is later seen writhing uncontrollably from the pain while lying on her hospital bed. In one scene, Teresa's feet are shown contorting and digging into the bed - when the camera moves back, we see Teresa rubbing her face, her body is contorting in agony, and her legs are rapidly sliding and kicking around on the bed. Jamie, at his worst, is also seen writhing in pain, curled up in a ball and barely able to speak. Jamie said he wished that he was stung by Chironex fleckeri instead since "the pain goes away in 20 minutes or you die".

Another recent program that aired on the Discovery Channel entitled Stings, Fangs and Spines featured a 20 minute spot on Irukandji Syndrome. In the segment, a young Australian woman was stung and developed a severe case of Irukandji syndrome. In a testament to the severity of pain involved, a re-enactment (featuring the actual victim portraying herself) shows her screaming and violently thrashing around on the hospital bed in an almost convulsive state, for the bulk of the segment. She later commented that this unbearable pain lasted for hours, and added that "I didn't think it was possible for anyone to endure that level of pain without turning into a vegetable".

Yet this Barnes guy subjected his son to it.

What a whacko.

Source: Wikipedia
Google Books
(detailed story of the experiment in question)
Three Panel Soul (hilarious comic)

Stubborn Robots
So Dextre has been behaving a bit badly.

Dextre is officially called the Canadian Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator. It is supposed to be moved around the outside of the ISS on the end of a massive articulated arm, Canadarm2, which has already been fitted to the space station. The mighty tonne-and-a-half robot has two 11-foot arms of its own, video cams, lights, and "three robotic tools" with which it can "perform delicate human-scale tasks", it says here (pdf, p54).

This will allow maintenance and so on to be done without time-consuming, potentially dangerous spacewalking by human astronauts.

At present, unfortunately, Dextre doesn't work.

"Initial attempts to route power to Dextre were not successful Thursday," according to NASA, and the partly-assembled Dextre has been "temporarily parked on the station's truss".

The plan is to grapple the recalcitrant robot with the Canadarm2 later today. "With Dextre grappled to the arm, the cabling path that is believed to be causing communications interference will not be in the loop", apparently, and "it is expected that normal communications will then be established."

Spacegoing veterinarian Linnehan and his fellow shuttle specialist Michael Foreman will perform a further spacewalk tomorrow to fully sort Dextre out.

Oops.

Dextre didn't even want to get out of the shuttle at first.

Still, we always have engineering to get us out of our messes... with violence.

HOUSTON, Texas (AP) -- Two spacewalking astronauts attached 11-foot arms to the international space station's huge new robot Sunday, preparing the giant machine for its handyman job on the orbital outpost.

The Canadian-built robot, named Dextre, will stand 12 feet and have a mass of 3,400 pounds when it's fully assembled. It is designed to assist spacewalking astronauts and possibly someday take over some of the tougher chores, like lugging around big replacement parts.

The already challenging outing turned grueling as Richard Linnehan and fellow spacewalker Michael Foreman struggled to release one of the robot's arms from the transport bed where it had been latched down for launch.

Two of the bolts wouldn't budge, even when the astronauts banged on them and yanked as hard as they could. They had to use a pry bar to get it out.

The other arm came out much more smoothly and quickly, paving the way for Linnehan to pull up Dextre's body 60 degrees, like Frankenstein rising from his bed. That was the ideal position for plugging in Dextre's gangly arms to its shoulders.

Fortunately, it seems that things are under control.

Astronauts have assembled a massive robot handyman called Dextre that will carry out much of the maintenance work at the International Space Station.

Richard Linnehan and Robert Behnken succeeded in putting together the gangly humanoid robot with 11ft arms during a seven-hour spacewalk that finished earlier today - by chance, the 43rd anniversary of the first spacewalk.

Later, after they have slept, the astronauts will move Dextre by remote control to its new home on the side of an American space laboratory called Destiny.

Take that, stubborn, Canadian robot.

Mission Control praised Linnehan and Behnken for their work, though they hit a snag when a suitcase-sized science experiment refused to hook itself on to the side of Columbus, the newly arrived European space laboratory.

Is NASA buying their stuff from Best Buy now? Yeesh.

Source: The Register
CNN.com
The Times Online

Salmon
So the Chinook salmon run in California has been badly depleted. Nobody is quite sure why, but it's pretty serious.

Federal fisheries managers took the first step Friday toward imposing what could be the strictest limits ever on West Coast salmon fishing amid a collapse of the central California chinook salmon fishery.

...

The Sacramento River chinook run is usually one of the most plentiful on the West Coast, providing the bulk of the fish caught by commercial trollers off California and Oregon.

But this year's returns — even with no fishing allowed — are expected to reach less than half the council's goal for spawning a new generation. It marks the third straight year of declines, and the outlook for next year is no better.

After years of declining salmon runs, few fishermen rely solely on salmon for a living.

...

In most years, about 90 percent of wild chinook salmon caught off the California coast originate in the Sacramento River and its tributaries.

Only about 90,000 adult salmon returned to the Sacramento River and its tributaries to spawn last year, the second lowest number on record and well below the government's conservation goals, according to federal fishery regulators. That's down from 277,000 in 2006 and a record high of 804,000 in 2002.

Biologists predict this year's salmon returns could be even lower because the number of returning young male fish, known as "jacks," hit an all-time low last year. Only about 2,000 of them were recorded, which is far below the 40,000 counted in a typical year.

...

Marine scientists blame an unusual weather pattern that triggered a collapse of the marine food web in 2005, the year most of this year's returning adults were entering the ocean as juveniles.

Fishermen, environmental groups and American Indians largely blame the salmon's troubles on poor water quality and water diversions in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

So who's right? Maybe all of them.

Fishermen think the Sacramento River was mismanaged in 2005, when this year’s fish first migrated downriver. Perhaps, they say, federal and state water managers drained too much water or drained at the wrong time to serve the state’s powerful agricultural interests and cities in arid Southern California. The fishermen think the fish were left susceptible to disease, or to predators, or to being sucked into diversion pumps and left to die in irrigation canals.

But federal and state fishery managers and biologists point to the highly unusual ocean conditions in 2005, which may have left the fingerling salmon with little or none of the rich nourishment provided by the normal upwelling currents near the shore.

...

So what happened? As Dave Bitts, a fisherman based in Eureka in Northern California, sees it, the variables are simple. “To survive, there are two things a salmon needs,” he said. “To eat. And not to be eaten.”

Fragmentary evidence about salmon mortality in the Sacramento River in recent years, as well as more robust but still inconclusive data about ocean conditions in 2005, indicates that the fall Chinook smolts, or baby fish, of 2005 may have lost out on both counts. But biologists, fishermen and fishery managers all emphasize that no one yet knows anything for sure.

Bill Petersen, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s research center in Newport, Ore., said other stocks of anadromous Pacific fish — those that migrate from freshwater to saltwater and back — had been anemic this year, leading him to suspect ocean changes.

After studying changes in the once-predictable pattern of the Northern Pacific climate, Mr. Petersen found that in 2005 the currents that rise from the deeper ocean, bringing with them nutrients like phytoplankton and krill, were out of sync. “Upwelling usually starts in April and goes until September,” he said. “In 2005, it didn’t start until July.”

Mr. Petersen’s hypothesis about the salmon is that “the fish that went to sea in 2005 died a few weeks after getting to the ocean” because there was nothing to eat. A couple of years earlier, when the oceans were in a cold-weather cycle, the opposite happened — the upwelling was very rich. The smolts of that year were later part of the largest run of fall Chinook ever recorded.

But, Mr. Petersen added, many factors may have contributed to the loss of this season’s fish.

Bruce MacFarlane, another NOAA researcher who is based in Santa Cruz, has started a three-year experiment tagging young salmon — though not from the fall Chinook run — to determine how many of those released from the large Coleman hatchery, 335 miles from the Sacramento River’s mouth, make it to the Golden Gate Bridge. According to the first year’s data, only 4 of 200 reached the bridge.

Mr. MacFarlane said it was possible that a diversion dam on the upper part of the river, around Redding and Red Bluff, created calm and deep waters that are “a haven for predators,” particularly the pike minnow.

Farther downstream, he said, young salmon may fall prey to striped bass. There are also tens of thousands of pipes, large and small, attached to pumping stations that divert water.

The Feds claim that they're dealing with the diversions, but of course, we know how well water policy is handled out west, so it's a dubious claim to stake.

Hopefully they can bounce back next year.

Source: Raw Story
The New York Times

Borg Bugs, Bats
DARPA is up to their usual lightning-and-cackling no good.

DARPA (the Pentagon asylum for usefully-insane scientists) is apparently making progress with its plan to build cyborg infiltrator machines wearing living creatures like fleshy cloaks.

Lest anyone think that this is a story about California politics, however, one should note that thus far DARPA and its associated groups are working with moths rather than immense Austrian bodybuilders.

Flight International reports that engineering boffin Robert Michelson - perhaps most famous for his "Entomopter" synthimuscle-flapper insectoid Martian mini-bot plan - gave an update on the DARPA programme at a joint US-Indian miniflybot conference on Friday.

Encouragingly - for those who find the cyborg concept appealing, anyway - it seems DARPA has found that it is indeed possible to pull out the middle of a suitable creature, throw all the entrails in the bin, and slip a mechanoid core into the resulting freed-up space. The machine's fleshy cloak will even go on to show good tissue growth afterwards, at least in the case of Manduca moths.

Ewwwww. Spy moths.

It gets better; there's a rival project of SPY BATS. Robots, fortunately, not mutilated mammals.

The University of Michigan (UM) is pleased to announce that it has been awarded $10m by the US Army to carry out research leading to a "six-inch robotic spy plane modelled after a bat", which would "gather data from sights, sounds and" - worryingly - "smells".

The university has used the army cash to found a Centre for Objective Microelectronics and Biomimetic Advanced Technology, or COM-BAT - a clear case of Media Targeted Acronym Related Titling, or Media-TART syndrome.

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

Source: The Register
The Register

Golden Eggs
Some boffins in genetic engineering work have devised chickens that lay eggs containing vast quantities of valuable drugs without harm to the birds.

Nifty.

Forget about the elaborate creations of master chocolatiers. The genetically modified brown eggs produced by a flock of designer hens at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh are the biotechnological equivalent of a Fabergé.

Several generations of Isa Brown hens - a prolific egg-laying French cross between Rhode Island Red and Rhode Island White - have been bred from "founder birds" that were genetically altered by Dr Helen Sang and her team to contain human genes.

Each gene provides the recipe for the production of a corresponding human protein. In the Roslin Institute hens the human protein is found only in their eggs, reducing the risk of harm to the hens themselves.

The egg proteins are rich in expensive drugs that can fight cancer and other diseases, with each egg containing enough medicine to treat a handful of patients each year.

...

They used a virus called equine infectious anaemia lentivirus, which infects horses, to insert the human genes into chicken embryos in newly laid eggs, by creating a chimera - a blend of GM and normal cells.

Crucially, some of the sperm cells in the resulting chimeric cockerels carried the new gene for the human protein, and passed on the implanted gene to their daughters.

These hens also contain the human gene in every cell of their bodies. The team controls precisely where the gene is used for protein production in the birds, to ensure that the potent biotech drugs do not affect the birds themselves.

The gene is tagged on to part of the hen's gene for ovalbumin, the major protein in the white part of its eggs.

Because this gene is only used in egg white, the protein drug does not harm the birds.

...

The Roslin team has hatched several drugs this way: miR24, a monoclonal antibody with potential for treating malignant melanoma; the antiviral drug human interferon b-1a; and beta interferon, used to treat multiple sclerosis.

The institute is also about to publish research showing that it has around 20 birds that can make even higher levels of alpha interferon, about a gram per litre of egg white, to treat hepatitis C.

This is why I really hate all those anti-GM fanatics.

No, we don't have to trust Monsanto with our souls. But we shouldn't throw away a whole, and very promising, field of study just because 'Nature' didn't intend for something.

Nature sucks. Give me an army of drug chickens any day.

Source: The Telegraph