On February 9, 1913, a unique procession of meteors was observed from Canada, parts of the US, and in one case, off the coast of Brazil. Several streams of brilliant meteors were seen moving relatively slowly across the sky; the event lasted too long for a regular meteor sighting, but too short for a regular meteor shower, and moreover, the meteors did not, like showers, radiate from a single point in the sky. Most of North America was cloudy that day, so out of the millions of potential observers, only hundred-odd reports were made, mostly from remote locations, but there is no doubt that it happened. The meteors were accompanied by a trembling sound.
Comparing eyewitness reports and making calculations of possible trajectories, scientists have proposed a remarkable possibility: that this event, called by some the Cyrillid meteor shower, was a short-lived natural satellite of the Earth. (This view is not undisputed.) Natural satellites, especially bigger ones, are more conventionally called moons. If this hypothesis is true, the most likely explanation for the 1913 event is that some small celestial object, after however many round-trips around the Sun, got caught in orbit around the Earth, for a brief while giving us a second, tiny moon, until it broke apart into a brilliant procession of meteors.
Science should be open. If you support that sentiment, this initiative is good news. It is a call for researchers to declare a boycott of Elsevier, one of the largest publishers of scientific journals in the world. Elsevier makes enormous profits off the free labor of scientists all over the world. Scientists do the research, write the papers, do the editing and peer-review, and then the paper gets published by an Elsevier journal, earning the middleman enormous profit. In order to protect its business model, which consists of adding literally nothing worthwhile to science or the general public, Elsevier forces libraries to buy bundles of their journals, rather than just the journals they want or need. At the same time, they make every effort to restrict the free flow of scientific knowledge, supporting laws like SOPA, PIPA, and the Research Works Act, which seeks to prohibit open access mandates to publicly funded research.
The reason this works is that these are prestigious journals that everyone uses. If one researcher refuses to participate, it’s little more than a nuisance to their fellow scientists. If many people announce their unwillingness to participate in this scheme, however, maybe real progress can be made. Elsevier is only part of the problem, but it is probably wise to focus on one specific company to begin with.
Alternatives to the commercial journals—which, again, to emphasize, do not actually make any money for the benefit of scientists or science—already exist. Open access to scientific papers and data will make science more democratic, and likely more efficient as well. It will also benefit the general public. When I write about science on this blog, I try to rely on primary sources, but often, they are behind paywalls, and I can’t afford to spend hundreds of dollars to purchase access to papers only to write a free blog. If science is open access, that means people like you and me don’t need to rely on people affiliated with research institutions or with sufficient economic means to interpret science for us. We can do it ourselves.
In the scientific limelight, that is. Sort of. In the 1950s and 60s, there was a great deal of optimism about the potential of psychedelic drugs for therapeutic use. Drugs like LSD and psilocybin, the active substance in magic mushrooms, were touted as the cure for everything from depression and unhappy relationships to serious crime. As the hippie era wound down and these drugs were made illegal, the scientific investigation of these substances ground to a halt. It’s possible to speculate, discuss and editorialize a lot about the hows and whys of this, but since this is not a politics blog, we’ll skip straight to the chase. After decades of little in the way of scientific research on psychedelics, it seems that they’re on their way back.
Psilocybin has seen mainstreamcoverage recently due to two fresh-off-the-presses new studies. One looked at the brains of people tripping on psilocybin, using fMRI scanning, and found something surprising: the vivid, hallucinatory state of mind isn’t caused by increased activity in the brain, but decreased activity in a few key areas. These included the anterior and posterior cingulate cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex, which are believed to function to coordinate our mental worlds into neat narratives we can understand. Feelings of ego or the sense of self are also related to these areas, and they’re overactive in depressed or anxious people. As others have pointed out, this seems to fit with what Aldous Huxley, author and mescaline enthusiast, theorized all the way back in 1954:
But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. (…)
That which, in the language of religion, is called “this world” is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language. The various “other worlds,” with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large. Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary by-passes may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate “spiritual exercises,” or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows, not indeed the perception “of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe” (for the by-pass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind at Large), but something more than, and above and something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality.
That study had some implications for treatment of depression and anxiety, but the other study making the rounds looks at this more directly. It looked at how the increased ability to visualize during a psychedelic trip could be used to reinforce positive autobiographical memories. Healthy volunteers reported more vivid recollections on psilocybin than on placebo, and vividness was positively correlated with subjective well-being on follow-up. Brain imaging also appeared to support the subjects’ reports of vivid activation of memories. While hardly conclusive, these two studies are grounds for optimism, and should lead to further studies on psilocybin’s potential as a therapeutic tool.
The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies is funding a bunch of different studies, especially focusing on psychedelic-assisted therapy for patients with posttraumatic stress disorder in war veterans and for anxiety associated with terminal illness. There was a good story about therapy aided by MDMA (ecstasy) in Oprah Magazine (of all places). In 2002, a paper was published in Science that claimed to show that MDMA was severely neurotoxic. It turned out that the study, which had been done on monkeys, had used methamphetamine, and not MDMA, and thus had to be retracted.
Finally, there is ibogaine, a substance found in the iboga root and traditionally used for its visionary effects by the Bwiti tribe of Gabon. Ibogaine has a great potential as a treatment for substance addiction. Around the world, there exist treatment centers with varying degrees of official sanctioning and legality. In rats, ibogaine inhibits cocaine self-administration. In humans, it has proven effective in treating opiate withdrawal. Ibogaine’s mechanism of action is complex and little understood. It may work by somehow “resetting” cognitive or behavioral patterns associated with bad habits, not limited to substance abuse, but much more research is needed to make this notion precise.
Major pharmaceutical manufacturers remain uninterested in psychedelic research. The substances are, after all, illegal, but perhaps more importantly, the patents are expired, and the suggested treatments recommend administering the drug a limited number of times. In other words, psychedelic treatments are unlikely to be very profitable.
Priming is a psychological phenomenon in which being exposed to a word or a stereotype can make us more likely to later act according to the prior stimulus, even if we have no conscious recollection of it. For example, people are more likely to complete a word stem like “TH” with “think” if they were previously exposed to that word. One widely cited study published in 1996 found that subjects exposed to words relating to old age in a word-scrambling task would walk more slowly down a hallway after completing the task. Slowness, of course, being a trait stereotypically associated with the elderly. The authors took this to be evidence that the word-task had primed the subjects to act old. But a new study led by Stéphane Doyen presents evidence that it may all be in the heads not of the subjects but of the experimenters.
In science, experiments are often double-blind, that is, neither subjects nor experimenters know which one of the possible conditions the subject is in. This is to prevent the unconscious expectations of either subjects or experimenters from influencing the outcome. Doyen attempted to replicate the 1996 findings, but devised a very strict protocol to ensure that the experiment was indeed double-blind, as expected. This experiment failed to reproduce the original findings. No one showed evidence of priming. However, Doyen then did another experiment, this time manipulating the experimenters’ expectations. Half of the experimenters were told to expect that the primed subjects would walk more slowly. The other half were told the subjects would walk faster. Lo and behold, that is exactly what Doyen observed. When the experimenters expected primed subjects to walk faster, they did; when they expected them to walk slower, they walked slower. (The actual measuring of walking time was done automatically using infrared sensors.)
The priming was real, but it had nothing to do with the unrelated word-task. It was all about what was going on in the experimenters’ heads, and how the subjects picked up on it and acted accordingly. Which, as Ed Yong points out, isn’t so different from Clever Hans, the horse who mastered arithmetic.
Wolbachia is a very common and very interesting group of bacteria. It infects insects and arthropods, living inside their cells, and is known for modifying the reproduction of host species in a variety of ways. It may play a role in rapid speciation, lateral gene transfer, and has potential as a vector in genetic engineering.
Some of the ways Wolbachia modifies reproduction:
It spreads from mother to offspring. The mechanism is pretty clever: Wolbachia causes what is known as cytoplasmic incompatibility. Basically, infected eggs are compatible with infected and uninfected sperm, but uninfected eggs are only compatible with uninfected sperm. Thus infected eggs have more options, and the infection spreads through the population.
Parthenogenesis. This is what you see above in the wasp eggs. Parthenogenesis means reproduction without fertilization. The bacteria cause an egg to develop into a female wasp without being fertilized by wasp sperm. The bacteria accumulate in the end of the egg that will develop into reproductive organs.
Feminization of genetic males. Wolbachia can make genetically male offspring into sterile or fertile females. This is to Wolbachia’s advantage, since it spreads through the maternal line. For example, in the woodlouse, Wolbachia supresses an androgenic gland, and genetic males become fertile females.
Selective killing of males. Wolbachia can also straight-up kill males, making sure that females survive to bring the parasite into the offspring.
Wolbachia can also cause bidirectional incompatibility. This may lead to rapid speciation. For example, Nasonia is a wasp genus consisting of three sibling species. They can’t reproduce with each other, and each species has its own strain of Wolbachia. It is, however, unclear which one preceded the other.
Vertical gene transfer is the usual, parent to offspring. Gene transfer outside parent-to-offspring is called lateral gene transfer. It’s uncommon to see lateral gene transfer between prokaryotes and multicellular eukaryotes, but scientists have found evidence of gene transfer between Wolbachia and insect as well as roundworm species. Some species had the entire Wolbachia genome embedded in their own.
Finally, there’s the potential for using these bacteria in biological control. Genetic engineers prefer to piggyback on nature: that way is a lot easier. Genetically modified Wolbachia can potentially be used to control insects that carry diseases like Malaria, either by transferring genes that make the carriers unable to carry the parasite, or by using Wolbachia’s manipulation of reproduction to reduce the fertility of the insect population.
The largest balls in the world: the bush cricket Platycleis affinis, apparently, has the largest testicles around. 70 mg may not sound like much, but it’s an impressive fourteen percent of the cricket’s body mass. A little back-of-the-envelope calculation of what a human male would have to sport in order to compete: assuming the average male weighs 75 kg, he would have to have balls weighing 75/100*14 = 10.5 kilograms. If this mass were to be concentrated in an average pair of testicles, whose volume is about 36 cm3, the density would be 10500g/36cm3 = 292g/cm3. That’s twice as dense as the core of the Sun.
The guys who measured bush cricket balls didn’t do it just to settle who’s bigger. They found “that testis mass increased with the degree of polyandry, but decreased with increasing ejaculate mass.”
First images of a newly discovered primate, the Burmese snub-nosed monkey. “Local people claim that these monkeys are easy to find in the rain, because they often get rainwater in their upturned noses, causing them to sneeze.” It’s expected that the new species will be classified as critically endangered, as there are only about 300 of them, and their habitat is under threat from logging and development.
The concept of vitamins is a hundred years old this year.
During the late 19th century, there were outbreaks of fatal beriberi in East Asia. The study of this disease would lead to the discovery of vitamins. Kanehiro Takaki, a doctor in the Japanese navy, took a special interest in the disease. The navy was plagued by illness: between 1878 and 1881, in a sample of a thousand men, each man in the navy fell ill an average of four times every year, and beriberi accounted for a third of the cases. Takaki noticed that beriberi was common on some ships and rare on others, and set out trying to find why. He noticed that the disease was uncommon among higher-ranking officers, and more common among sailors; after eliminating other factors, he became convinced that the cause lay in their diet.
In the 1880s, the germ theory of disease was the new kid on the block, only verified and commonly accepted in the last few decades. Ignaz Semmelweis had discovered in the 1840s that requiring physicians to wash their hands after examining dead bodies and before examining living patients reduced the incidence of puerperal fever. John Snow traced the source of a 1854 cholera outbreak in London to contaminated drinking water, thus disproving the prevailing “miasmal” theory of disease (that disease was caused by noxious air). Robert Koch had identified the bacterium responsible for anthrax in 1875. It was only natural to look for a bacterial cause of beriberi. But none could be found.
Takaki found that by introducing a more varied diet to the sailors, who mostly ate polished rice, beriberi was eliminated almost completely.
Around the same time, in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), Christian Eijkman noticed that hens fed polished rice developed beriberi-like symptoms. The disease could be cured by feeding them rice bran. Adolphe Vorderman continued this work by studying beriberi in prisons on Java. He found that it was common in prisons that served mostly white rice, but extremely rare in prisons that served unpolished rice. Beriberi wasn’t caused by some bad substance introduced to the patients; it was caused by the lack of a good substance the body needs. By 1900, beriberi was believed to be a deficiency disease, and it turns out that it isn’t the only one.
Finally, the Polish biochemist Casimir Funk did a series of chemical studies of the magic substance in rice bran that could cure beriberi. He found it to contain nitrogen. In 1912, he published a paper called The Etiology of the Deficiency Diseases. In it, he presents the idea that there is a certain class of amines (derivatives of ammonia, or NH3) the body needs, but can’t synthesize itself: hence the need to introduce them through our diet. We only need tiny amounts of these substances, but if we lack them, we get sick. Funk called these compounds vital amines, or vitamines.
As it turns out, not all vitamins are amines, but the name stuck. We now know that beriberi is caused by thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency. Scurvy is caused by vitamin C deficency, and pellagra by the lack of niacin (vitamin B3).
Eijkman shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work. Today, of course, nutritional science holds a prominent place in medicine and the public consciousness, and we all know how important a healthy and varied diet is. But we learned all this in the last hundred years. It isn’t longer since the time doctors couldn’t even imagine that a limited diet might cause disease.
I think this story also underlines the cooperative and cumulative aspects of science. None of the scientists mentioned in this post could have discovered vitamins on their own, yet all of them provided necessary pieces of the puzzle. This is one of the reasons science needs to be open, transparent and accessible to as many people as possible.
