Cool Medicine

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Sam Flatow
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As a fan of exotic medical treatments, I thought it might be a good idea to cover something a little more tasteful than maggots this time. Instead, I present the underutilized field of therapeutic hypothermia.

As the name suggests, therapeutic hypothermia is the act of cooling the body down, most commonly to aid in the treatment of cardiac arrest. Cardiac arrest causes 300,000 hearts to stop in America every year. Less than 10% of the owners of those hearts will survive long enough to leave the hospital. Even if you are lucky enough stay alive without a heartbeat for a significant period of time, the lack of circulation may mean that some of your brain cells have suffocated.

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine way back in 2002 found some good outcomes for therapeutic hypothermia. Keep in mind that the survival rate of this study is much better than the 10% mentioned earlier because resuscitation was attempted on everyone between 5-15 minutes after the heart attack, so it doesn’t take into account those who were alone or unable to get help in time. Of the people put on ice, 55% survived and suffered little or no brain damage after 6 months, compared to 39% of the control group.

You’d think that getting dumped in a freezer would lower your chances of a good recovery. Well, Anna Bågenholm is glad that a little cold is a good thing. For her, a LOT of cold was a good thing. Anna had the privilege of accidentally becoming a case study for therapeutic hypothermia when she fell face-first through a frozen stream in a skiing mishap . Trapped under the ice, she found an air bubble, which sustained her for 40 minutes before her heart gave out. Rescuers couldn’t get her out for another 40 minutes.

Anna reached the hospital an hour after being dragged from beneath the ice, Once there, doctors found her body temperature to be a crisp 56.7 degrees, the lowest recorded temperature at which anyone has survived. Nine hours and a rotating staff of 100 doctors and nurses later, she was alive. It turns out that the 40 minutes she spent breathing out of that air bubble gave her body time to cool, which slowed her metabolism to a fraction of its normal speed. By the time her heart had stopped working, her brain didn’t need much of the oxygen that her blood couldn’t deliver. As a result, she didn’t have any brain damage. After 2 months, she left the hospital with only minor nerve damage in her hands.

Despite the miraculous recovery of Anna Bågenholm and several papers highlighting the merits of therapeutic hypothermia, a recent study published in Therapeutic Hypothermia and Temperature Management found that few doctors use this technique. Of the 26,519 patients of cardiac arrest studied in the paper, only 92 patients were treated with hypothermia. That’s 0.35%. Why aren’t we using such a useful tool to fight against such a common and deadly disease? Well, the treatment isn’t widely available partially because doctors don’t have the knowledge or equipment to use it. Hopefully, the future will be a little colder for medicine.

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That Other electric vehicle

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Carl Flatow
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There’s plenty of concern expressed in the media, right now, about weak consumer demand in electric cars. Bad press about the Chevy Volt’s battery fires (long after a crash, for goodness sake) and continued range anxiety about pure electric cars like the Nissan Leaf have consumers skittish about spending a significant premium that they won’t recoup for years. So where is the compelling business case for all-electric propulsion?

When I first looked into the Ford Transit Connect Electric, although I couldn’t justify the high cost with my annual mileage needs, I realized that for a business that sends out vehicles on local runs every business day, the payback equation is quite different.

This week I started seeing these cutesy ads on TV from FedEx. They are painting themselves as a Green company as they grow their all-electric fleet – that’s the ticket. It seems to me that UPS has even more all-electric vehicles on the roads.

So while we wait for the first real consumer oriented all-electric car that doesn’t push your range-anxiety button, to come out later this year, let’s keep our eyes out for those all-electric delivery vehicles. Is that one over there? (Psst…Wanna watch the ad? I’m a sucker for fun animation, and these ads could do a whole lot to bring the public around.)

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Grazing Towards a Cooler Climate

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Neil Wagner
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X

Which of the following statements is accurate, and which is outlandish?

  1. Letting animals graze in an arctic region as they did in the last ice age will keep permafrost frozen and lower the area’s temperature.
  2. Letting trees grow naturally in drought-riddled regions leads to more fertile soil.
  3. Plowing a field causes rain.

ANSWER: All three answers sound outlandish, but (1) and (2) are believed to be true.

(1)
Russian physicist Sergey Zimov is populating a portion of Siberia with moose, reindeer and other animals that used to graze in the region during the last ice age. He believes grazing herds will keep the grass healthy, encouraging better growth. And by trampling snow, the herds will eliminate the blanket of insulation that would prompt the permafrost to melt. Additionally, Zimov is clearing out trees as part of his “back to the ice age” experiment. This will also encourage the area to cool a bit, since grass reflects more sunlight than trees.

At this point, the project seems to be working — temps in the area have dropped and the permafrost has remained stabile. This scheme prompts not only short term temperature drop, but long term as well, since prevention of permafrost thaw means potent greenhouse gases will remain locked in the frozen ground, rather than released into the atmosphere.

(2)
From a paper by the Congressional Hunger Center:

Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR), a set of practices farmers use to foster the growth of indigenous trees on agricultural land, has drawn substantial attention as a contributing factor to a trend of increasing vegetation greenness in the Republic of Niger…. FMNR raises household income and increases crop diversity, household migration rates, and the density and diversity of trees on farmland. It is estimated that FMNR raises the annual gross income of the region by between 17 and 21 million USD and has contributed an additional 900,000 to 1,000,000 trees to the local environment. These findings support the value of continued promotion of FMNR as an inexpensive means of enhancing rural livelihoods and an attractive alternative to reforestation efforts relying on tree planting.

Learn more about FMNR in this excerpt from “Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth”

(3)
Unfortunately, “Rain follows the plow” was proven to be false, in part by a little thing called the Dust Bowl. When the great plains were being settled, it was believed that simply churning up the prarie to create farmland would lead to wetter conditions. In reality, removing the prarie’s natural vegetation, which had held the soil together during dry and windy spells, allowed soil to simply blow away.

So allowing nature to take its course leads to good growing conditions, while plowing unsuitable land does not. Boy, if I didn’t know better, I’d say nature knows what it’s doing.

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Science and Art in Antarctica

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Kayla Iacovino
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Laura Von Rosk, landscape artist turned Antarctic research and ice diving assistant, spent the last 3 months working in a remote field camp in Taylor Valley, Antarctica known as Explorers Cove with cell biologist Dr. Sam Bowser and his team studying and observing single-celled organisms known as Foraminifera. She was there to assist with the scientific research and dive teams and, in one way or another, to incorporate this experience into her own work as a visual artist from above and below the ice. Laura has given us a full report (plus photos and videos!) of her adventures in the Great White South.

New Harbor view from Camp

(more…)

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Probing Erebus Volcano, Antarctica with Inrfrasound and Seismic

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Kayla Iacovino
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Another year, another Antarctic field season for the volcanologists. This year, our field correspondant Tehnuka Ilanko is reporting live from Mount Erebus, a very active volcano located on Ross Island just miles from McMurdo station, the largest Antarctic base. Tehnuka joined Paige Czoski in the field and interviewed the New Mexico Tech undergrad about her work probing the inner workings of Erebus volcano with infrasound and seismic sensor networks.

Tehnuka is a writer and member of The Volcanofiles, a group of PhD students travelling the world, studying volcanoes, and sharing it with you. This interview is also posted at volcanofiles.com.

Paige working on her infrasound array

Volcanofiles: What is infrasound?

Paige: Infrasound is normal sound but at a lower frequency that what we can normally hear. Humans can hear from 20 – 20 000 Hz, but infrasound is anything less than 20 Hz. Infrasound is good for studying volcanoes because, since it’s such a low frequency, it can travel long distances. It travels through the air so the energy doesn’t get scattered or lost between the source and the receiver. Infrasound is good for volcano monitoring because you can detect eruptions even if the volcano is obscured by clouds or ash, whereas seismic detectors only sense ground movement – you can’t necessarily tell if there’s anything coming out of the volcano. Infrasound is also used to study earthquakes, bomb testing, to track meteorites entering Earth’s atmosphere, and the weather (e.g. tornadoes and lightning).

Volcanofiles: What are you hoping to get from the infrasound on Erebus?

Paige: I’m putting out six infrasound detectors in a spoke shaped pattern about 60 m across, located a couple of kilometres from the summit. With this small array, I can pick up eruptions, rock falls and possibly ice quakes (caused by cracking of the ice). There are already infrasound sensors on Erebus that are monitoring year round (check out the MEVO website) but this experiment is different in that the sensors are so close together. The sensors measure the distance from the source, so I can use the time differences in when the signal arrives at each sensor to accurately pinpoint where the source is.

Volcanofiles: What is a seismometer?

Paige: A seismometer is a device that uses masses and springs to measure ground movement – volcanoes, from the magma moving beneath the surface, and from eruptions, create ground movement, so we can use seismometers to measure the inner workings of a volcano.

Changing a seismometer

Volcanofiles: How and why are you using seismometers at Erebus?

Paige: This is an experiment for Julien Chaput at New Mexico Tech., to study how energy is scattered off different rock layers and structures within the volcano.

I’m setting up an array of six seismometers in the shape of a 50 m wide square, with one in the middle and two on the same corner. The square shape is so that he can constrain the scattering in a certain area. Five of the seismometers are broadband seismometers, which means they can measure high and low frequency movement; and one of those on the same corner just measures high frequency movement.

Seismic array – the green and red boxes. The tents are where we sleep! Photo courtesy of Nels Iverson.

Julien recently published a paper in Nature on using seismic waves and scattering to locate magma.

Volcanofiles: Given that you’ve had experience of this sort of work in other places, what are some of the particular challenges and rewards of working out here in Antarctica?

Paige: The wires get really brittle and hard to work with, and my hands get cold! Otherwise, I love it here! I love the snow and it’s really cool being so isolated. Just being able to walk out and see the view from here is awesome – and the fact that we’re on an active volcano where you can see lava!

Seismic station on the Side Crater. From left: Nial Peters, Paige, Nels Iverson.

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It Don’t Bug Me

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Sam Flatow
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Kids these days are crazy about “vintage.” “Vintage” 8 tracks, “vintage” t-shirts, “vintage” mayonnaise – if it’s old, they love it. And half the stuff is awful. A typewriter? You think a typewriter’s cool? I used a typewriter when I was a little kid. Once. Try pushing a key. Nope, it’s not broken, it’s supposed to be that awful. I think they lubricated those things with sand.

So, when I found out that scientists were revisiting maggot therapy, I wasn’t surprised. But In contrast to the typewriter, I was delighted to learn that we might use these tiny surgeons. Why?

The thing about maggots is that they love to eat dead tissue, but they just don’t touch the healthy stuff. Maybe they think it’s gross. What that means for medicine is that if you have a wound in need of cleaning, dumping a bunch of maggots in there means they’ll clear out all the nastiness while ignoring the stuff you’d like to keep.

It’s not exactly cutting edge technology. Maggot therapy outdates antiseptics by hundreds of years. Mayan healers used to soak bandages in cattle blood, then let them bake out in the sun before applying them to certain kinds of lesions. The idea was that flies would be attracted to the delicious scent of decay and leave some eggs in there. Ok, so maybe exposing an open wound to fermented blood wasn’t the best idea, but they got the idea – maggots = good.

Fly larvae was used in Europe as early as the 1500s, when a French surgeon had a patient with such a horrible head wound that he lost a chunk of his skull as big as a hand. Miraculously, the man recovered, and months later a bunch of maggots popped out. After that, the surgeon let maggots do some of the work for him, probably while quipping, “See, I totally meant to leave worms in that guy’s brain.”

Maggot therapy didn’t really make a jump into the world of modern medicine until World War I, when another French surgeon by the name of Baer rediscovered the cleansing power of fly larvae, and used them in his treatments. After the war, he experimented with and promoted using maggots, and during the 1930s over 300 US hospitals used them. It wasn’t until the 1940s when antiseptics became the cool new thing that maggots fell out of style.

Maggots made a short cameo during World War II when they were used by prisoners in Japanese POW camps. Malnutrition and abysmal health conditions combined with forced labor resulted in some serious cuts and scrapes, especially below the knee. Without access to any medical supplies, prisoners were forced into the desperate practice of maggot therapy either through accident or application. There are survivors who claim it saved life and limb, literally.

More recently, a study in Diabetes Care involving the MRSA infected foot wounds of diabetic patients “demonstrated for the first time…the potential of larval therapy to eliminate MRSA colonization….” In other words, baby bugs kill superbugs.

The most recent study, published in the Archives of Dermatology, found that maggots were able to clean out necrotic tissue just as fast as modern medicine. It requires no highly trained surgeons, no loss of healthy tissue, and a vial of sterile bugs costs $100. Sounds like a cheap and efficient alternative to surgery. It’s also ‘totally retro.’

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If You Give a Mouse a Beer

Posted on December 15, 2011 by Sam Flatow
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If you give a mouse a beer, he’ll decline and ask for water. Why? Probably because when you have to support such a large family, you just don’t have the time or money to spare on booze. But don’t worry, we humans can fix that pesky responsible behavior. A paper published in Addiction Biology introduced the world to a new mouse that can double as a drinking buddy.

Now, scientists have gotten mice to drink before – they even genetically engineered a few with built in tolerances. But the problem was, the mice never wanted to drink. When given a choice, they wouldn’t touch the booze. The only way to get them to loosen up was to take away their water or inject them directly, which can make for awkward conversation the next day.

It may have taken 40 generations of selective breeding, but these mice will drink all night every night and reach an average blood alcohol content of .26 (which for humans is over three times the legal driving limit and the point where the next morning turns into a detective novel called “How Did I Get Home and What Are All You People Doing In My Living Room?”). They kind of have a problem, probably because they’re designed to have a problem so that scientists can do alcoholism research. At least that’s what scientists are claiming to do. Then again, these same scientists are running the mice across a balance beam to test their performance, so who knows what’s really going on.

My suspicion is an elaborate obstacle course involving one or more “chugging” sections where the rodent must achieve a “blackout drunk” level of intoxication before he can cross the balance beam and reach the “call the ex-girlfriend” challenge. It may take about 6-7 hours for these mice to get drunk enough to compete, but progress is progress.

This experiment is about “free-choice drinking,” where the mouse is not physically forced to drink alcohol and given an alternative, water, but does so anyway. The irony is that scientists have instilled a love of poison so strong that everyday a mouse will drink until, if it were a person, it would be unable to form memories. What does that say about “free choice?”

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Egg Counting

Posted on December 13, 2011 by Sam Flatow
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I’m starting to believe that birds in general are jerks. I can understand why. Think about it, your ancestors are dinosaurs, some of the biggest, meanest monsters ever, and you’re stuck as a pelican. No Mr. Pelican, I won’t make fun of you because you always look sad or confused.

Take the ultimate bird-jerk, the cuckoo. Refusing to care for their own young, a cuckoo will sneak into other avian nests, lay its egg, and trick the nest owner into raising a baby serial killer. And when I say “tricks the nest owner into raising a baby serial killer,” I mean that when the baby cuckoo hatches, it blindly murders its nest mates so it can monopolize all the resources and space his adopted parents provide. And when I say “blindly murders its nest mates,” I mean the deed is done before the little jerk develops sight.

This strange adoptive relationship is called brood parasitism, and it’s not unique to the cuckoo. A recent study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B looked at a similar scenario between the chalk-browed mockingbird and the shiny cowbird.

But the cowbird isn’t as cunning as the cuckoo. The cowbird will assault a mockingbird nest and, while under attack from the protective homeowners, poke a hole in a mockingbird egg, and lay one of its own. There’s no hiding, no espionage, no tiny bird cameras and photos of secret entrances, they just shove their way in, punch some holes, dump some eggs, and wing it. It’s not quite a smash ‘n’ grab, more of a smash ‘n’ drop.

You’d think that when the attack was over, the mockingbird would just dump out any unwelcome eggs, but that’s not what happens. The researchers found that chalk-browed mockingbirds who have had their eggs destroyed will keep any replacements–because those new eggs increase the chance that their own will survive. Now if another creature attacks the nest, the cowbird eggs act as decoys, hopefully absorbing some of the carnage, and saving the mockingbird’s own genes from going to waste.

This statistical advantage is so useful that mockingbirds will rear the outsider egg, spending as many resources on alien genes as they would their own. This isn’t altruistic behavior–the mockingbird isn’t thinking “well, I can’t blame the children because the parents murdered my future babies.” No, this is a cold numbers game.

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The Coast is Clear — For Climate Change Mayhem

Posted on December 5, 2011 by Neil Wagner
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Early November brought Alaska its worst storm in decades. It was described as “historic,” “epic,” and “massive.”

While there is debate about the effect anthropogenic climate change has on current weather, there is increasing evidence Alaska’s recent storm (and, even more clearly, coastal hurricanes) have human fingerprints all over them.

Since sea ice acts as a buffer  to storms coming in off the ocean, as do wetlands in more temperate regions, absence of sea ice and wetlands would expose coastal populations to greater impacts from storms coming in from the sea. Unfortunately, we have been doing a pretty good job of removing these helpful buffers. For example, Worldwatch Institute says that 1,900 square miles of coastal islands and marshland have vanished in Louisiana since the 1930s.

And, of course, there are myriad studies that identify man-made global warming’s role in loss of sea ice.

Add up all those statistics and one could determine that our loss of coastal protection illustrates our loss of survival instinct.

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Happy Middle

Posted on November 24, 2011 by Carl Flatow
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Back in September I wrote about a colony of bees that I saved from a downed tree. I subsequently saw the new queen that they raised lay eggs which were raised by the workers into new worker bees, thus establishing that the queen had successfully mated and that the hive was what we call queen-right — in other words, viable.

Yesterday, in Chapter Two of this story, I was able to move that colony into an observation hive as part of a new exhibit area that is being built at the Long Island Children’s Museum, called, Feasts For Beasts. It seemed clear to me that these bees were not able to, sufficiently, build their numbers up and put away sufficient stores to make it through the Winter outdoors, but in the warmth and protection of this indoor housing I do hope that I can keep them going through the next few months until Spring.

Starting in January, when this new exhibit opens at the Museum, we will share this observation hive with the public. I will keep you posted, and I will, then, describe, what I believe is a new approach to honeybee observation hive design.

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