The first week of June is almost over, and the weather is finally starting to warm up (and soon we’ll all be complaining about the heat!). Some neat things happened in Science Land this week, so without further adieu…
5) Happy Birthday, Tetris! One of the most iconic computer games of our time has a big birthday tomorrow. Whether the rather simple game excites, entertains, frustrates or annoys you, Tetris‘ multi-color blocks of squares (and the slightly entrancing music) have engaged the world for 25 years, and is still popular with gamers and regular folks alike. The Russian-created game, which got it’s name in part from the word “tetra”, meaning four (all Tetris pieces have 4 squares) is widely considered to be one of the best games of all time…but can’t hold a candle to Space Invaders on the Atari! Check out this super-creative video of human Tetris, including an a capella version of the games background music and sounds:
4) Contact lens cure? Australian scientists have reported that coating contact lenses with a patient’s own stem cells can successfully treat severe vision loss caused by corneal damage or birth defect. Limbal cells, a type of stem cell naturally found in the eye, were found to improve sight after only a few weeks of contact lens wear. Only 3 patients were involved in this study, so it’s a long way from being a done deal, but the results are definitely promising for those with corneal and other eye damage; particularly since corneal transplants (from cadavers) are the only treatment in many cases.
3) Giggling primates. In a hilarious study (it’s a pun…wait for it) released this week, scientists in the UK have found that young primates respond to tickling just like humans do…by laughing! It’s known that primates make laugh-like sounds while playing, but this research is the first to compare the laughing of bonobos, orangutans and chimpanzees to that of humans. And it turns out that we humans aren’t as special as once believed – our primate relatives have “breathy” or even vocal laughs, just like we do, suggesting this was a trait that our ancient, evolutionarily common ancestors shared. But as a person who HATES being tickled, I wonder if the animals in the study were laughing on the outside, but annoyed on the inside…
2) Save your data. Forever. University of California-Berkeley physicists are developing a nanoparticle that they predict will be capable of storing data for over 1 billion years. Current technologies for data storage, including disks and hard-drives, degrade over time and are only able to last up to several decades. Though we are far more advanced than the cassette tapes and floppy disks that my generation grew up with, most of us will still outlive our data in its current storage form. The new technology uses iron nanoparticles that store bits of memory when a voltage is applied to a particle stored inside a carbon nanotube. As more information is added, the electrical properties of the tube change accordingly, which allows “playback” of the information. Just think, we’ll soon be saying “I’ll just save that file to my iron-housing carbon nanotube.” Kinda has a nice ring to it☺
The much-celebrated fluorescent baby marmosets, with insets of how they appear under ultraviolet light.
1) Glowing, just like Mom and Dad. Although this came out last week, it’s important enough to make it onto this week’s list. A team of Japanese scientists has reported the first ever transgenic primates that passed on the engineered genes to their babies. Researchers introduced the gene for the Nobel-winning green fluorescent protein (GFP) into marmosets, using a virus to carry the DNA into the host cells. This has been done before…the big news is that the gene was passed on to the offspring of these transgenic animals, so that just like the parent(s), the babies glowed green under UV light, too. Other animals have previously done this successfully, including very recent success with dogs (glowing puppies!), but this is the first time ever with a primate. OK, this sounds odd…why would we ever want to make animals green? Well, we don’t. As is often necessary in science, this research is an example of what’s called “proof of principle” – the need to show that something can actually work, before doing the real experiment. In this case, GFP is just an easy test example (success = green-glowing babies); the real goal is to research human diseases in animals more closely related to humans than lab mice. The hope is that by successfully introducing into primates genes that cause Parkinson’s diabetes and other diseases, we’ll have much better tools with which to investigate how to treat them. Awesome. And seriously, how cute are those little guys?
Have a great weekend!
-Rabiah
June 8, 2009 at 9:43 am
If only scientists could figure out a way to improve vision with spit cells. You know–take all those times people have to spit on their contact lenses before putting them back in their eyes?
That glowing monkey thing is very cool. I was wondering why anyone would care that monkeys could glow. Your explanation of “proof of principle” brings it all together for me.
June 8, 2009 at 12:29 pm
I used to do that with my contacts in college, thinking “it’s my spit, and it’s my eye, so what’s the big deal?” Totally gross and potentially unsafe, since our mouths are teeming with bacteria, food particles and other things that can damage the eye and/or the contacts. Ew.
June 8, 2009 at 3:46 pm
OK, I have another thing I’d like to bring up. It’s about those cute glowing monkeys. I’m not sure how good I feel about those monkeys being given genes that can cause horrible human diseases like Parkinson’s or diabetes. I know we can’t test everything on humans, but I’m not totally comfortable with testing on animals either. Do you have any information that might make me feel more at ease?
June 18, 2009 at 12:27 pm
That’s a tough subject that, frankly, I’ve been very hesitant to talk about here on the blog. From a scientific perspective, it’s pretty clear that understanding diseases and developing effective drugs are far more efficient when animals are used as experimental models. With some exceptions, virtually everything we put in and on our bodies has, at some point, been tested on mice, rats, monkeys or other animals, to make sure that they work properly and that they are safe – the lotion we use every morning, the sweetener in our coffee, the drugs that fight cancer. During animal testing, researchers often spend years doing experiments to determine the right dosage and procedures to make a treatment both safe and effective, but along the way, test animals can be in pain, get terribly sick and even die as a part of the process.
An alternative to animal testing would be testing in humans only, which means that human patients would have to volunteer to take drugs that could be extremely dangerous, even lethal. That’s a pretty scary scenario, too, but it highlights the the major point of the animal testing issue – Is the life of a human worth more than an animal’s? The law says yes, since harming or killing a cow, for example, carries a lighter penalty than a similar act on a human being. But in research, though scientists are required to be as humane as possible, the lines can be less clear. If the new transgenic technology allows scientists to insert an Alzheimer’s-causing gene into monkeys so that we can learn how to treat the disease, does any suffering by the monkey outweigh the benefit of potentially finding a cure in the next ten years? As a person who spent much of my childhood living with, caring for, and learning from a truly amazing grandmother who had Alzheimer’s, I respectfully say no. But it’s a “no” that carries with it the understanding that animal sacrifice for scientific purposes, is not trivial, and is to be respected and appreciated.
I think that whatever your view is, it’s important to keep asking questions and sharing ideas. There are some resources for young people online that talk about this issue in a respectful way; one that I like is All About Animals – age-specific information (click on “The Issues” and then “Animal Testing”) http://www.allaboutanimals.org.uk
Thanks for the thoughtful question!
-Rabiah