Mad Cow: it's here!

Talked to U of C's Dr. James Mastrianni, one of only two doctors in the country who works with living patients with Creutzfeld-Jakobs Disease (the human version of mad cow.) Prions, which are mysterious misfolded proteins that cause CJD--they're neither bacteria nor viruses, and no one knows very much about them at all--have to be contained in a level 3 Biohazard Safety Lab. What's that involve? Check it out!

This is gross

SO I fell in an inflatable obstacle course at our school's summer festival last weekend and bled all over the place, right? And it coalesced into a magnificent scab which I miraculously refrained from picking (mostly) which came off the other day while I was in lab. So, naturally, because I am me...I put it under the microscope. It was glorious and fascinating and absolutely disgusting. I wish that I could take pictures with our microscopes. And then I was debating whether it would be in good taste, had I taken that picture, to actually post it online (the answer is OF COURSE NOT but I probably would anyway) and then I discovered that someone has in fact already lived out my dream: Got a microscope with a camera attachment and went around taking pictures of everything in his house at 100X. Including his own blood and his dog's booger.

crap. Meant to read about creating green collar jobs, wound up reading Michael Crichton on how environmentalism is a religion instead.

Swine flu...in Chicago

5 cases of unconfirmed swine flu in Chicago. Two of them are staff at the U of C hospitals.

The reason why it takes so long to ID swine flu is that there are no local centers for testing - the Centers for Disease Control have to do them out of their labs in Atlanta.

I've talked to a couple of University researchers about the flu. One of them studied (for kicks, apparently) the path of the 1918 flu pandemic in Chicago and U of C in particular - turns out we were hosting a garrison of WWI soldiers at the time. Here they at left, drilling on Stagg Field, the U of C's old Big Ten football stadium (with no little irony, where our library is now.)


Read about what happened to these guys here!

Swine flu

It's a public emergency. I'm sure someone in the University has studied it, so on the Biological Sciences head's advice, I'm going to talk to a professor Olaf Schneewind (with such an excellent name, I'm sure he'll be awesome) for a possible Maroon article.

There are so many unanswered questions: Why hasn't Chicago, with so many people with ties to Mexico, seen an outbreak yet? Is it going to be like the 1918 pandemic, where young, healthy people like myself were the hardest hit? (Although since it killed something like 60 million people, your odds were pretty bad either way.)

More to come.

Love from Space

NASA's just released a series of photos taken by the Cassini spacecraft above Saturn. They are ridiculously awesome:



This is what they have to say about it:
"This natural color mosaic was acquired by the Cassini spacecraft as it soared 39 degrees above the unilluminated side of Saturn's rings. Little light makes its way through the rings to be scattered in Cassini's direction in this viewing geometry, making the rings appear somewhat dark compared to the reflective surface of Saturn (74,898 mi across). The view combines 45 images taken over the course of about two hours, as Cassini scanned across the entire main ring system. The images in this view were obtained on May 9, 2007 at a distance of approximately 700,000 miles from Saturn. (NASA/JPL/SSI)"

Check the rest out here.
Originally linked by the excellent John Scalzi.

Man + Machine at last?

Just finished the latest science feature for the Maroon. This one's about Nicho Hatsopoulos, a Greek statue of a man who works in what he calls "brain-machine interfacing" - essentially, using technology to let people communicate using only their brains. Useful? Sure, but especially for people missing arms and legs or paraplegics: it looks like someday we could be able to fit them with mechanical arms that are controlled with cues from their brain. Like Luke Skywalker's prosthetic hand in Empire Strikes Back, only better.

Read more about it here!.

Haiku you

In order to 1) increase my creative output and 2) alleviate my boredom, today's thoughts are in haiku form.

HAIKU 1
It's hot. You would think
Lake Michigan is warm too;
Trust me, it is not.

HAIKU 2
Ultimate frisbee
Louise is dead; but we won
So it was worth it.

MRSA bacteria breaks out of jail

My article on the MRSA (commonly called Staph A) epidemic, how the first doctor first noticed it in pediatric wards at the University of Chicago Hospitals, and what they did about it is up at the Maroon website.

The doctor who first noticed it is Robert Daum and he was wonderful to interview. He also says he's always looking for volunteers for the MRSA project!

Geese

Okay. So this is why spring is no good for my homework. I'll be trudging along through my reading on Romanian economic crises, and then the faint sound of the geese honking on Henry Crown Field comes through the window, and I think, "I wonder if Canada geese are good to eat?" ... and my fingers stray towards Wikipedia to find out ... and I have to go "No, Louise, no," and force myself to go back to Romanian pyramid schemes.

(ETA: Turns out they are.)

the story of the Poop Tomatoes

Looking for jobs and found an organic farm in Naperville. I had no idea we had organic farms so close. It looks sweet, if unproductive toward future career, because you get paid partly in vegetables.

So then I read up on organic farming. Turns out the USDA has standards for organic farms to be certified organic, one of which -- about how long animal manure has to be "cured" before you can harvest vegetables off the land where you use it -- brought back a story my parents told me once. It has poop in it!

My parents moved to Mokena, a town which (then) was in the boonies surrounded by farms, a year or two before I was born. They built the house we lived in there. So obviously they didn't have a lawn at first, just dirt. They saw an ad in the paper for (treated) sewage fertilizer: the state would come and spread it on your lawn for free. So they did.

The crop that came up that first year after they spread the sewage wasn't grass: it was a verdant field of ... tomato plants. Hundreds of tomato plants.

Turns out tomato seeds pass unharmed through human digestive tracts and survive to germinate.

So come July my parents had a bumper crop of tomatoes, dozens of pounds, on their hands. They brought them to work and everyone thought they were the tastiest tomatoes ever.

Best story ever yeah?

I love science

1. According to my bio book, "physiologists have been attempting to find a substitute for blood ever since 1878," when some fool T. Gaillard Thomas "attempted to transfuse a patient with whole milk instead of blood."

2. The relationship between hair length and humidity is used in an instrument called a hair hygrometer. So THIS is what people do when they grow up and become real scientists.

Early human diet a hard nut to crack for U of C prof.

My first science column for the Maroon is up!

What did our early African ancestors eat to survive in tough times, and how do we know...based on only their skulls and some sweet computer technology? Find out here!

Hemochromatosis and my weakness

I have a terrible weakness for one kind of evolutionary genetics theories. This is the kind where recessive gene disorders are explained by saying that 1 copy of the gene gives you an advantage over some other disease or condition. For example, 1 copy of the sickle-cell anemia gene is supposed to confer resistance against malaria, etc.

The reason why I call it a weakness is because though these theories are REALLY attractive, evolutionarily-speaking, sometimes they have holes.

So I'm writing my Celtic Societies paper on another one. This one is called hemochromatosis. It's supposedly the most common recessive genetic disorder in Europe and the U.S., although it's most common in people of Northern European descent (aka "Celtic" peoples). 1 copy helps you store more iron; 2 copies and your body builds up so much iron over a lifetime that you get heart and liver failures and maybe even turn a little gray.

It's been said, and I want to say, that the hemochromatosis mutation happened after humans switched to agriculture (about c. 2000 B.C.) because there isn't much iron in grains, so it was evolutionarily useful for people to store more iron.

And yet, geneticists have only traced the hemochromatosis mutation back 60 generations or so, which puts it after 1 A.D. or 2,000 years after that mutation would have been suddenly useful. And if it was so useful, why didn't it explode across all newly agricultural societies?

Sigh - another hole in my favorite brand of theory.