by Poncie Rutsch

Dory and Marlin are trapped inside of a whale in the midst of their search for Marlin’s son Nemo. Marlin wants desperately to escape and slams himself into the whale’s baleen. And the whale does spew them out — after a brief Marlin vs Dory struggle…and some excellent footage of the whale’s oral anatomy, complete with a uvula.

If you don’t know what a uvula is, that last sentence probably looked a bit questionable. A uvula is the chandelier of your mouth. It’s a little bit of flesh that hangs down from the roof of your mouth at the opening where your mouth becomes your throat. Say AH and you’ll see it.

[for quality whale uvula footage, fast forward to about 2:00]

But here’s the thing: whales don’t have uvulas. Only a few animals do. And scientists are still trying to figure out whether humans need uvulas in the first place.

In 1992, researchers searched the mouth cavities in a number of animals to see if there was even a trace of something that could have evolved into a uvula – almost like our tailbone shows we may have once had tails. They looked in dogs and horses and cows and apes and sheep. And this is what they found:

“Of all animals in the study, a small underdeveloped uvula was found only in two baboons. We found that the human uvula consists of an intermix of serous and seromucous glandular masses, muscular tissue, and large excretory canals…. Thus, the uvula is a highly sophisticated structure, capable of producing a large quantity of fluid saliva that can be excreted in a short time.”

The researchers also suggested that the uvula lubricates our vocal cords, and could be necessary to make some sounds that are critical for human language. Another camp of researchers disagrees though. They think that it’s just some vestigial trace of our ancestors (again, like your tailbone), without any essential purpose.

Their camp gets a little support from a type of surgery called uvulopalatopharyngoplasty (try saying that five times fast). The surgery doesn’t necessarily remove the entire uvula, but it removes parts of the soft flesh inside the mouth to reduce snoring and sleep apnea. Even those uvula-less patients appear to be communicating just fine.

Look around. Each of the Muppets has a felted uvula so that when they lean back to belt out songs you see a human-like mouth.  I bet you’ll see uvulas everywhere now…or at least in every animated movie.

So why bother stuffing uvulas into animals? It’s not like the uvula is an essential part of the human body, let alone one that seems quintessentially human. It would be easy to overlook, except it’s always there. It would seem like the animators just don’t know any better, but when was the first time you even noticed you HAD a uvula?

And on that note, it’s time for some obligatory Muppet uvulas.

by Poncie Rutsch
BU News Service

For years, neuroscientists have defined epilepsy as a case when too many nerve cells in the brain fire at once, provoking a seizure. Researchers could differentiate a few types of epilepsy, based on which parts of the brain were over-firing. Now, researchers have determined that it isn’t just a matter of function – the brains of people with epilepsy  structurally differ from those of people without the disorder.

According to lead researcher Steven Stufflebeam, a neuroradiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, the differences between the two brains suggest new ways to diagnose and treat epilepsy moving forward.

Stufflebeam and medical student Matt DeSalvo focused on temporal lobe epilepsy, the most common type of epilepsy among adults. Temporal lobes are part of the cerebral cortex, and aid in visual memories, processing the senses, language, and emotion. During a temporal lobe epileptic seizure, neurons in the brain randomly begin firing too frequently, sending those parts of the cortex go into overdrive.

The researchers compared the brains of people with epilepsy and people without to understand the white matter, the tissues that form connections between grey matter, or the brain cells. They used a type of MRI brain imaging called diffusion tensor imaging. Unlike a typical MRI, which shows some brain tissues or inflammation, this type of imaging induced a magnetic field to show the movement of water molecules through the brain, illuminating the paths molecules use to travel the brain.

The researchers induced sixty different magnetic fields to highlight sixty possible directions in the brain, and then compiled the images in one all-inclusive brain scan.

The researchers found that brains with temporal lobe epilepsy have very different structures from those without epilepsy. Patients with epilepsy have less long-range connectivity, and more short-range connectivity that patients without the disorder. The white matter that the researchers mapped connected parts of the brain located closer together, rather than farther apart.  These short range connections in epileptic brains appeared within the brain structures responsible for wakeful rest such as daydreaming or introspective thought.

The study helps neurology researchers move toward the idea that epilepsy could be an issue in the the brain’s network, not necessarily the result of brain damage. Researchers used to blame temporal lobe epilepsy on injuries to the temporal lobes. But more and more studies like DeSalvo’s are showing that that’s not the case. “Injury can still play a role,” says DeSalvo, “but more and more it’s thought of as a network disease.”

Stufflebeam and his colleagues published their findings this week in Radiology. The study is part of the National Institute of Health’s Human Connectome Project, which seeks to map brain connections.Stufflebeam and his colleagues published their findings this week in Radiology. The study is part of the National Institute of Health’s Human Connectome Project, which seeks to map brain connections.

The findings offer insight into which people might benefit from surgery. “With temporal cases,” said Stufflebeam, “about 90% of those patients will benefit from surgery.” The surgery excises the part of the brain from which the seizures seem to start. “But there’s still 10% that fail,” said Stufflebeam. “They still have seizures and aren’t completely cured.”

Both researchers think this may be due to connectivity within the brain. Surgeons can estimate how much brain to remove to decrease epileptic seizures, but it’s an educated guess. In the future, doctors and patients could use the images from this research to determine whether surgery will be effective.

“We may be able to predict outcomes based on the connectivity we see,” said DeSalvo.

By Cassie Martin
BU News Service

If you were ever one of those kids who wanted a dinosaur (me!) or an airplane growing up, you may just get your wish after all. Last week, the Smithsonian Institution launched the Smithsonian X 3D Explorer, a new tool that will one day allow the public to print scale models of any one of the museum’s 137 million artifacts that are otherwise hidden away in the archives. Some artifacts that are currently available for printing include a fossilized woolly mammoth, a supernova, and Abraham Lincoln’s face.

The Smithsonian began 3D scanning its collection in February and so far has only documented 20 items in its collection. Some artifacts are harder to scan than others are because of their size and intricacy. The woolly mammoth, for example, had to be scanned from 60 different perspectives so every bone and angle was captured. Günter Waibel, director of the Smithsonian’s Digitization Program Office, said that even if they were able to digitize one object per minute, it would take 270 years of working 24/7 to scan the entire archive. Their current goal is to document 13 million items, but partnerships with other institutions could increase that number.

Overall, the project is an effort to make museums more interactive and science more accessible to research scientists, curators, educators, and the public. And with the increasing popularity and decreasing cost of 3D printers (they now cost around $1,000; cheaper than a MacBook), it’s possible to print yourself a fossilized dolphin skull. The Smithsonian not only hopes this gives people who wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to visit their museums a chance to experience its wonders virtually, but they also hope 3D printed artifacts will become learning aids in the classroom.

While you contemplate investing in a 3D printer, check out this interactive scan of the aforementioned woolly mammoth!

Credit: Smithsonian/Autodesk

Few marine animals capture the briny deep’s mystery and fragility as well the bluefin tuna.

Bluefin tuna can grow up to three meters in length and over a thousand pounds in weight. They are the Michael Phelps of ocean swimmers, with bodies perfectly contoured for long distance swimming – they can even pull their dorsal fins in to reduce drag. They’re not the fastest (that award goes to the Sailfish, closely followed by the Marlin), but they usually fall somewhere in the top five fastest fish.

Bluefin tuna are cruisers. Pacific bluefin spawn off the coast of Japan and the young fish migrate over six thousand nautical miles to the eastern Pacific. Some tuna make this trip in as few as 21 days. Bluefin tuna return to their natal waters to breed and spawn once more. Atlantic bluefin model a similar pattern, traveling between the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Mexico.

But bluefin tuna are severely over fished because they are highly coveted for sushi. Bluefin is one of the most tender, flavorful fish available. A single bluefin can sell for $100,000 at fish markets in Japan. They’re caught nearly everywhere they swim, and often before they reach maturity and can reproduce to replenish the population.

Creating a fishing policy or conservation plan for the bluefin tuna is difficult because no one knows exactly where they swim. This is where the Tag-A-Giant program comes in. A joint project between Stanford University and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Tag-A-Giant attaches small tags that will signal the fish’s location back to researchers. The researchers have focused most closely on bluefin tuna, but have also followed billfishes and a couple of shark species.

You can follow the Tag-A-Giant team as they capture tuna and attach the tags at their blog.

Bonus fun tuna fact: Bluefin tuna are ectotherms, meaning that like most fist, their body temperature fluctuates with the temperature of the water. But where many people would call ectotherms cold-blooded, bluefin tuna are warm-blooded. They can heat their core body temperature to about ten degrees fahrenheit above the surrounding water. Keeping their blood and muscles warm allows them to work more efficiently, helping the tuna to cruise through a trans-ocean journey like it’s no big deal.

By Poncie Rutsch
BU News Service

I’ve always wanted to bob for apples on Halloween but unfortunately, I grew up in the era of germaphobes. The first time I saw an actual bucket filled with water and apples primed for the bobbing, I was 12. Now people bob for apples on strings. Or in their own private buckets.

But why is it that people decided to stick their heads in a bucket of water in the first place?

Bobbing for apples supposedly dates back to pagan festival of Samhain, the beginning of fall. More recently, bobbing was used for fortune telling on the British Isles in the 19^th century. Once a person caught the apple, they would peel it and toss the long peel over their shoulder, where it would supposedly form the letter of their true love’s first name on the floor.

What’s especially interesting is that the apples they would have bobbed for would not have tasted all that sweet. Sweet apples originated in Kazakhstan, but even there they were more likely to be pressed into hard cider than eaten.

The sweet apples we have today are the result of thousands of years of careful domestication. If you grow apples from seed, the results will be small and bitter; palatable, but not the apple of your dreams. The best apples come from grafting different species together.

After years of manipulation, many favorite apple varieties are lacking in genetic diversity. Breeders graft native crabapple species to choice trees to try and raise their diversity — to prevent the spread of disease or pests. They’ve done this so many times that apples in North America are now more closely related to crabapples than to their ancestors in Kazakhstan.

I particularly like that if you slice an apple in half at its equator, the seeds form a pentagram, classically associated with paganism.

So fortune telling, alcohol, paganism…sensing a theme yet?

 

By Poncie Rutsch
BU News Service

This is Tom McFadden (formerly “the Rhymbosome”). He raps about science.

Full disclosure, Tom McFadden was my TA for behavioral biology in college. A friend of mine edited his videos.

McFadden, who claims that he never takes himself seriously as a rapper, strung together wordplay infused lyrics to make science memorable. He proceeded to get a master’s degree in science communications.

Now he teaches 8th grade biology and keeps his eyes peeled for fresh science rappers.

All I can say is, apparently we’ve come a long way since Joyful Protein Synthesis.

By Sara Knight
BU News Service

1. The Pegomastax Africanus (“thick jaw of Africa”), or the Vampire-Porcupine-Chicken-Dinosaur

This is an ideal costume for the archaeology aficionado. Based off paleontologist Paul Sereno’s serendipitous rediscovery of this little cat-sized terror’s fossils in a Harvard basement last year, your costume should encompass the main features of the cute little dinosaur:

– Parrot-like beak
– Giant fangs (its 3-inch skull boasted ½-inch long fangs)
– Coat of porcupine-like bristles (you can use straws cut to a point – bonus points if you can figure out a way to get them to stand-up as a reaction to threats)

The creature, which skittered about the Lesotho region of Africa 200 million years ago, was bi-pedal and had grasping hands; to recreate the posture I recommend the standard “raptor” stance – arms tucked in, back hunched, head tilted.

2.Genetically-modified Mosquito with Scientist, a costume for couples

If you come with a built-in Halloween partner like a significant other or friendly roommate, you may want to look into couple’s costumes. One possibility is to nod to the increasingly trendy method of stamping out tropical disease – that of releasing genetically modified mosquitoes into the wild. The flies are engineered by British biotech company Oxitec.

The male mosquitoes (which do not bite – you can blame all your itchy aggravations on the ladies) are engineered with a tragic flaw. They pass down an altered version of the tTA gene to their offspring that effectively prevents the larva from developing into full-grown adult mosquitoes, thereby diminishing the population density of these insidious vectors for dengue fever and malaria.

To pull off this costume, one party needs the standard “scientist” accessories – a lab coat, beaker, glasses – while the other needs a good fly costume complete with wings, bubble eyes, and probiscus. Bonus points if you incorporate some indicator of genetic modification – maybe a big red “NO” cross on your crotch?

3. The Steampunk Insect, or the Issus Bug

This little guy, scientific name Issus coleoptratus, was big news in September when a paper published in Science demonstrated it as the first example of a functional gear found in nature.

The nymph form of this plant-hopper insect has two interlocking gears at the top of their hind legs that serve as propulsion mechanisms, assisting the bug in its extreme jumping acrobatics. The adolescent Issus can reach jumping speeds of 8 mph and an acceleration rate of 400 g’s – a typical human can only tolerate up to 5 g’s.

To get this look, wear your best bug costume and attach cardboard gears to your hips.

4. The Higgs Boson, or the Hardest Halloween Costume EVER:

Scientists Peter Higgs and Francois Englert won the Nobel Prize for physics this week for their work developing the concept of the Higgs boson particle, which theoretically is responsible for providing all the matter in the Universe with mass.

The closest we can probably come to representing the Higgs boson in a Halloween costume would be to recreate the read-out from a simulated collision between two protons (picture below) touted as possible evidence of its existence:

To get this effect, attach LED light strands to a black turtleneck. Be ready to have to explain yourself constantly, understand esoteric physics, and most likely endure exasperated eye rolls from your fellow revelers.

By Kate Wheeling
BU News Service

Camouflage patterned uniforms help soldiers vanish into their surroundings during the day, but at night, under infrared imaging, those same uniforms stand out against the environments they were fashioned to resemble. Now researchers at the University of California-Irvine and Caltech found a novel solution to this problem in the animal kingdom’s master of camouflage – the pencil squid.

Squid use a combination of reflective and pigmented cells to control skin coloration and blend into the background. The reflective cells create red, orange, yellow, green and blue color based on the angle that light hits them – the same process makes soap bubbles appear to change color in sunlight. Brown, red and yellow pigmented cells overlay the reflective cells and filter the light that reaches them. Squid use these two cell types in concert to produce colors than span the entire visible spectrum. Researchers zeroed in on a protein called reflectin, a main component of squid reflective cells and demonstrated its practical applications for stealth technologies in a study published July 30 in Advanced Materials.

The team, led by Alon Gorodetsky, Assistant Professor at UCI, created reflectin-coated thin films with tunable reflectance properties – they could manipulate the films to make them appear and disappear under infrared light. To begin, the team engineered E. coli to express a copy of the reflectin protein – a common strategy in protein engineering to produce and purify large quantities of a desired protein. They integrated purified reflectin onto glass by a process akin to spackling a wall. An adhesive layer between the glass and protein coating ensured the protein stuck to the glass and spread out uniformly. Glass is one of many materials options for this technology. This adhesive layer could be used to integrate the protein with virtually anything – plastic, paper, or even cloth. Once assembled, the thin films appeared orange under visible light, but it was their color under infrared light that interested the researchers.

The team then used a chemical trigger, acetic acid vapor, to tune the reflectance of the films over a large wavelength range – beyond what squid can even do, according to Lydia Maethger, an Assistant Research Scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. Researchers compared the infrared reflectance of the films to leaves, which reflect in the infrared and thus appear red when viewed with infrared cameras. When the researchers looked at the reflectin-coated glass with infrared cameras it appeared black. But when they exposed it to acetic acid vapor it appeared red. These changes were reversible, meaning that Gorodetsky and his team could alter the reflectance to match multiple environments.

This is only the first step towards the application of biological camouflage coatings. “Now we need to modify our approach to develop something that’s a little bit more robust and easier to use,” explains Gorodetsky. Acetic acid vapor triggers a reflectance shift well in the lab, but it’s not the best option for the real world. The group plans to look for other chemical or mechanical approaches to induce the same reflectance changes.

Camouflage coatings also need to stand up to the elements. While Maethger is impressed with the tunable range the researchers achieved, she cautions, “If this kind of thing is to be used in the field, it would have to be able to handle a lot of stress.” This isn’t a hard problem to solve according to Gorodetsky. Reflectin is already fairly tough and the thin films could be strengthened by cross linking the proteins.

But robustness won’t be a problem at all if the technology develops the way Gorodetsky envisions it now, “Really I see it as a disposable coating, maybe even something you could put in an aerosol can and spray yourself with and then once you no longer need camouflage, you just get rid of it” by wiping it off or changing clothes.

By Poncie Rutsch
BU News Service

As pop culture would tell you, scientists are old white guys with crazy hair. While that perspective is heavily biased (my hair is crazy, but not white), it isn’t totally unfounded.

The people who make science share their knowledge through academic journals, which traditionally take their contents very seriously. The journals accept science by peer review, meaning that the most prestigious, whitest haired, top-of-the-line scientists make sure the contents of the journal are up to snuff. And you can only read the journal if you, as part of the scientific elite, choose to pay for access.

But this model is outdated…or so would say the open access journals, which sprung to popularity about a decade ago. Open access journals claim their goal is to remove legal, financial, and technical barriers between people and their science. The only thing keeping people from reading the contents should be access to the internet itself.

The problem is, open access journals don’t have quite as spiffy a reputation as traditional journals. And this was what inspired the recent efforts of John Bohannon.

John wrote a spoof paper and sent it to hundreds of open access publishers. 157 published it. And then Science published him.

“Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper’s short-comings immediately,” John writes. “Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless.”

John submitted a paper that proclaimed a new wonder drug. He set up the paper with a simple formula: “Molecule X from lichen species Y inhibits the growth of cancer cell Z.” He substituted each variable with molecules, lichens, and cancer cell lines to create hundreds of papers. Each was unique enough to not attract attention, but the structure was similar enough to be used as a constant in John’s investigation. He submitted the paper using false names and institutions that he generated randomly from databases of common African names, words in Swahili, and African capital cities.

He included the same flaws in each paper – data that showed the opposite of his conclusions, an obvious lapse in the methods, and a control group that didn’t receive one of the constant level of radiation as the others.

Over 150 open access journals accepted the fake paper. John writes that over 250 of his papers went through an editing process, but that 60% showed no sign of peer review.

The final verdict is that open access journals have a long way to go. There may in fact be some merits to the peer-review system…even if you have to pay to get in.

You can also see John’s paper at BMJ. But of course, you’ll have to pay to get in.

Also, here’s a history of open access journals, courtesy of the wise people of tumblr:

By Cassie Martin
BU News Service

Hold on to your seats, Star Wars fans, because what I’m about to tell you is seriously cool. Scientists from Harvard and MIT have created a new form of matter that they are comparing to light sabers.

One of the lead researchers behind this discovery, Harvard Physicist Mikhail Lukin, said in a written statement “The physics of what’s happening in these molecules is similar to what we see in the movies.” Excuse me while my inner nerd jumps up and down with joy.

But what is happening, exactly?

Essentially, the researchers created an environment where mass-less photons (light particles) interact so strongly with one another that they act as though they have mass and bind together, forming molecules. But Lukin and his colleagues didn’t use the force to bind the photons together. No, they needed something more substantial.

The researchers pumped a rubidium (highly reactive metal) atom cloud into a vacuum, cooled it to just above absolute-zero, and fired two photons into the cloud using a weak laser. The photons emerged from the cloud stuck together thanks to what’s called the Rydberg blockade — an effect where one photon has to pass off its energy to an atom and move forward before a second photon can excite other nearby atoms. This results in the two photons pushing and pulling each other through the cloud, Lukin explained. “…when they exit the medium they’re much more likely to do so together than as single photons,” he said. The research was published in Nature online September, 25.

No word yet on the creation of real light sabers (one can only hope), but there are potential practical applications for this new discovery including quantum computing and the formation of 3-D structures completely out of light.