While melanin is best known as the pigment that protects our skin from being damaged by the sun’s ultraviolet light, it's also found deep inside the brain. Located in the substantia nigra which, as its name implies, is darkly pigmented, the melanin there is thought to play a role in sieving toxic metals from the blood such that they do not accumulate and harm neurons. This sieving property proved alluring to a team of engineers who wondered if if melanin could potentially be used as a nontoxic material to house the sorts of ions that are traditionally used in batteries. Keen to find out, they ran an experiment with melanin inside test batteries filled with different ion solutions and found that there is a real potential to create non-toxic batteries with it for future ingestible medical devices. You can read more in The Economist article that I wrote on this here.
The friend of my hearing hairs is my anemone
Healing your hearing (when not stinging fish)
Image courtesy of NHobgood.
Hair cells in mammals only have a limited ability to heal damage after being traumatised. That might not sound terribly important but when you take the fact that hair cells are crucial to mammalian hearing and lead to deafness when they become injured, it really is. Now a team is revealing that proteins used by sea anemones to repair their own hair cells are capable of healing the hairs found in the ears of mice.
Researchers have known for years that sea anemones have a remarkable capability to repair damaged sensory hair bundles on their tentacles by secreting proteins that go about fixing broken hair tips. More recently, a team of researchers demonstrated that they were able to use anemone proteins to help blind cavefish to reduce the regeneration time of the sensory hairs on their faces. This led the current researchers to wonder if the anemone proteins could help repair mammal hairs.
To test their idea out, the researchers experimentally traumatised the hairs found in mouse ears and then exposed them to a solution of containing the crucial anemone proteins. The results were remarkable and there is now a real possibility for this tactic to be used to improve hearing in those of us who attended too many rock concerts during our teenage years. You can read more in The Economist article that I wrote on this subject here or, if you are not in a reading mood, you can also listen to it here on The Economist's Babbage podcast.
Podcast: When psychology goes wrong
Everyone makes mistakes and scientists are no exception. Now an international team of psychologists is revealing that a bunch of major past studies examining our capacity for self control are entirely wrong. While that sounds bad, it is really good news that psychologists are double checking past findings. You can listen to the full story on The Economist's science podcast Babbage here.
Brewing unique coffee and chocolate
But which yeast is growing on them?
Image courtesy of JMHullot.
When making wine, yeasts are used that ferment the grapes. Whether the wines are made in South Africa, Australia or California, the strains of yeasts used do not vary. Production of coffee and cacao require fermentation with yeast too but, to date, nobody has known if the yeast strains for these processes are all as closely related as they are for wine. Now a team is revealing that they are not and arguing that this paves the way for exciting new flavours of coffee and chocolate to be made.
The new work effectively suggests that if chocolate and coffee makers meddle with yeast species, by, for example, mixing yeast strains that are normally common in the coffee of the Hawaiian isles into an otherwise Brazilian blend, there is the potential to create a brew that carries a mix of intriguing characteristics. You can read more in The Economist article that I wrote on this subject here.
Podcast: Starving out cancer
I was recently on The Economist's science podcast Babbage discussing how putting cancer patients on very strict diets can help destroy their tumours. You can listen to it here.