Ed Yong lives in London and works at Cancer Research UK. Not Exactly Rocket Science is his attempt to make science interesting to everyone by beating jargon, confusion and elitism with the stick of good writing. Ed is an award-winning freelance science writer. He finds writing about himself in the third person strange and unsettling.
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LOLbachia
December 2, 2008
Category: Personal
A quick reminder for anyone interested in ordering a copy of Not Exactly Rocket Science: the Book.
According to Lulu, to guarantee yourself a pre-Christmas delivery using the cheapest possible shipping method, you'll have to order by 10 December or 12 December depending on which part of the world you're in.
And if anyone has already ordered and read the book, feel free to voice your opinions here.
E
Posted by Ed Yong at 8:44 AM • 0 Comments
December 1, 2008
Category: Bacteria • Genetics • Medicine & health • Obesity
You are not alone. Even if you're currently reading this in complete isolation, you are still far from a singular individual. You're more of a colony - one human, together with microbes in their trillions. For every one of your own genes, your body is also host to thousands of bacterial ones. Some of the most important of these tenants - the microbiota - live in our gut. Their genes, collectively known as our microbiome, provide us with the ability to break down sources of food, like complex carbohydrates, that we would otherwise find completely indigestible.
Peter Turnbaugh from the Washington University School of Medicine has spent his career studying the microbiome. His latest work reveals both tremendous differences and similarities between the bacterial tenants of our digestive systems. Your bowels may be home to very different species of bacteria to mine, but both our sets share a core group of genes.
Turnbaugh likens the situation within our guts to that of islands. Real islands may be home to very different species of animals but all have representatives that perform certain roles; there will always be grazers, predators, insect-eating specialists, fishermen and so on. Across islands, animals approach a set of core lifestyles in different ways, and so it is with the microbiota - every man is an island, home to unique collections of bacteria that nonetheless carry out some core functions. And the further an person's microbiota strays from this standard template, the more likely they are to be obese.
Posted by Ed Yong at 8:30 AM • 5 Comments
November 30, 2008
Following last week's parrotfish, here's another underwater snap taken at the Whitsunday Islands. This is a bluespot stingray, and it was later joined by a second individual.
More pics and a video beneath the fold...
Posted by Ed Yong at 8:00 AM • 1 Comments
November 29, 2008
Category: Animals • Birds • Conservation • Mammals • Predators and prey
As Charles Darwin learned several centuries ago, islands are havens for evolution. Newcomers to these isolated worlds find themselves unshackled from the predators that dogged them on the mainland. They celebrate their freedom by diversifying into a great variety of species. But predators still have ways of tracking them down, and following the footsteps of sailors is one of them. By killing adults and eating eggs, introduced predators such as rats, cats and stoats are responsible for nine in ten of the bird extinctions since 1600.
Now, conservation agencies are getting serious about introduced predators. As an example, they have spent increasingly large budgets in recent years on the eradication of rats from troubled islands. Smaller stowaways like mice typically escape the conservationists' wrath, and between 2001 and 2005, twenty-five times less money was spent on dealing with them. After all, mice are smaller and less opportunistic than rats and pose very little threat to seabirds.
Or at least that was what scientists used to think. In 2005, Ross Wanless, Peter Ryan and colleagues from the University of Cape Town found that on Gough Island in the south Atlantic, mice had developed sinister appetites. They were eating the chicks of local seabirds alive (see image below).
Posted by Ed Yong at 10:00 AM • 2 Comments
November 28, 2008
Category: Personal
For some reason, I've only just discovered the navel-gazing blogger meme that started at Nature Network a few weeks ago. But I've written up a shed-load of science this week and I'm feeling lazy and introspective. So better late than never...
Posted by Ed Yong at 10:32 AM • 7 Comments
November 27, 2008
Category: Brain • Neuroscience • Perception • Psychology
It goes without saying that we are capable of noticing changes to our bodies, but it's perhaps less obvious that the way we perceive our bodies can affect them physically. The two-way nature of this link, between physicality and perception, has been dramatically demonstrated by a new study of people with chronic hand pain. Lorimer Moseley at the University of Oxford found that he could control the severity of pain and swelling in an aching hand by making it seem larger or smaller.
Moseley recruited 10 patients with chronic pain in one of their arms and asked them to perform a series of ten hand movements at a set intensity and to a set pace. The volunteers had to watch their arms as they went through the motions. On some trials, they did so unaided, but on others, they viewed their arms through a pair of binoculars that doubled their size, a pair of clear-glass binoculars that did not magnify at all, or a pair of inverted binoculars that shrunk the image.
On each trial, Moseley asked the recruits to rate their pain on a visual sliding scale. He found that they were in greater pain after they had moved their arms - no surprise there. But the amount of pain they felt depended on how large their arm appeared to them. They experienced the greatest degree of extra pain when they saw magnified views of their arms, and took the longest amount of time to return to normal. Perhaps more surprisingly, the "minified" images actually evoked less pain than normal.
Posted by Ed Yong at 8:30 AM • 7 Comments
November 26, 2008
Category: Animals • Evolution • Palaeontology • Reptiles
Clad in hard, armoured shells, turtles have a unique body plan unlike that of any other animal. Their shells have clearly served them well and the basic structure has gone largely unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs. But this unchanging nature poses a problem for anyone trying to understand how they evolved and until now, fossil turtles haven't provided any clues. All of them, just like their living descendants, have fully formed two-part shells.
But three stunning new fossils are very different. They belong to the oldest turtle ever discovered, which lived about 220 million years ago in the area that would become China. Unlike today's species, its mouth had a full complement of small, peg-like teeth but even more amazingly, it had a feature that distinguishes it from any other turtle, either living or extinct - it only had half a shell.
The ancient turtle was unearthed by Chun Li (no, not that one) from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who called it Odontochelys semitestacea, a name that literally means "toothed turtle in a half-shell". It was a small animal, just 35 cm from snout to tail, and its shell consisted of just a plastron (the bottom half) and not a carapace (the top half).
Li's team believes that this incomplete shell represents an intermediate step along the evolutionary path to the modern version. To them, Odontochelys's anatomy settles debates about how the group's distinctive shell evolved, which animals they were most closely related to and what sort of lifestyles the earliest members had. It's a true hero in a half-shell.
Posted by Ed Yong at 1:55 PM • 9 Comments
Category: Psychology
Throughout our language, the vocabulary of physical cleanliness is also used to describe moral cleanliness. We describe saints as pure and thieves as dirty; consciences can be clean and sins can be washed away. But more and more, psychological studies tell us that these concepts are entwined in a very real way. The act of cleaning, or even just thinking about the concept of cleanliness, can influence a person's moral compass, swinging it towards a less judgmental direction.
This isn't the first time that I've blogged about this. Two years ago, Chen-Bo Zhong and Katie Liljenquist found that volunteers who dredged up a past misdeed were more likely to think of words related to cleaning or show a physical preference for cleaning products. This "Lady Macbeth effect" is reminiscent of the infamous Shakespearean character and her failed attempts to wash her hands of spilt blood.
Simone Schnall and colleagues from the University of Plymouth have expanded on Zhong and LIllenquist's study by showing that the effect works in the opposite direction. Not only can feelings of moral muck trigger a desire for physical cleanliness, cleanliness can also change how seriously people view a moral transgression.
They asked 40 volunteers to a rearrange 40 sets of four words into sentences. Through this word-game, they 'primed' 20 of the volunteers with thoughts of cleanliness by interspersing half of their sets with cleaning-related words, such as pure, washed, clean, immaculate or pristine. The other 20 volunteers only saw unconnected neutral words in all of their sets.
Posted by Ed Yong at 7:30 AM • 3 Comments
November 25, 2008
Category: Bacteria • Palaeontology
Animal fossils are usually the remains of hard structures - bones and shells that have been petrified through enormous pressures acting over millions of years. But not all of them had such hard beginnings. Some Chinese fossils were once the embryos of animals that lived in the early Cambrian period, some 550 million years ago. Despite having the consistency and strength of jelly, the embryos have been exceptionally well preserved and the structure of their individual cells, and even the compartments within them, have been conserved in all their beautiful, minute detail.
They are a boon to biologists. Ever since the work of Ernst Haeckel in the 19th century, comparing the development of animal embryos has been an important part of evolutionary biology. Usually, scientists have to piece together the development of ancient animals by comparing their living descendants. But the preserved embryos give the field of embryology its very own fossil record, allowing scientists to peer back in time at the earliest days of some of the earliest living things. But how did these delicate structures survive the pressures of the ages?
Elizabeth Raff from Indiana University has a plausible answer. Her experiments suggest that fossil embryos are the work of colonies of ancient bacteria, which grew over the dead clumps of cells and eventually replaced their organic matter with minerals. They are mere casts of the original embryos.
Posted by Ed Yong at 7:30 AM • 1 Comments
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