The upper crust of society is commonly characterised as being aloof. Indeed, the trait has come to stand as an archetype for the social class. Yet it has been an open question as to whether this reputation is deserved and, if it is, why joining the higher echelons leads people to behave this way. Now a new experiment is revealing that members of the upper classes actually pay a lot less attention to the faces of other people as they walk down a street than members of the lower classes do. You can listen to the full story on The Economist's science podcast Babbage here.
Just add water
There is tremendous potential for living cells to be used for the biosynthesis of drugs, therapeutic proteins, and other valuable commodities. However, the need for specialised equipment and refrigeration for production and distribution has made it crazy difficult for these technologies to be used in the remote and low resource areas where they are often needed. To circumvent this challenge, a team has invented a portable device that uses pellets made from the freeze-dried bits of cells that manage DNA and arrange for protein manufacture which can be easily hydrated and put to use.
The researchers have demonstrated the effectiveness of their new technique by using it to manufacture the proteins that are needed for the vaccine for diphtheria. This synthetic foundry that they've created has the potential to be harnessed for the production of other vaccines and, if it proves financially viable to mass produce, could save a lot of lives in the developing world.
You can read more in The Economist article that I wrote on this here.
Feed a fever?
For treatment of viral infections only.
Image courtesy of Hoyabird8.
Whether the adage goes that it is best to feed a fever and starve a cold or the other way around depends upon which grandparent you ask. However, no matter how you square it, the concept of meddling with diet during times of illness is old. More importantly, the body does this all on its own by making you lose your appetite during certain sorts of infections. However, nobody has really looked into the biochemistry of all this. Now a new study is revealing that glucose is key.
The researchers behind the work knew from past animal studies that fasting was helpful for surviving some but not all infections. They also knew that fasting was vital to surviving really terrible bacterial infections. This led them to wonder which aspect of fasting was helping to combat the bacteria.
To explore this, they infected mice with dangerous bacterial and viral infections and monitored how they responded to diets that were limited in various ways. Glucose restriction dramatically improved survival in the mice with bacterial infections but proved lethal in the mice with viral infections. The reason for this, they suspect, is because bacterial infections drive cells in the body to shift from relying heavily on glucose for energy to relying on other compounds and that when glucose is provided in large amounts it gives the cells fuel that they cannot possibly use which forces the body to expend precious resources processing the unused glucose.
You can read more in The Economist article that I wrote on this here.
Navigating into darkness
Eye diseases like macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy are among the leading causes of blindness worldwide. The good news is there are several drug therapies that can be used to treat these disorders and prevent a total loss of sight. The bad news is that these therapies require drugs to be delivered to the back of the eyeball with a syringe. Understandably, most people are like me and don't even like the pairing of the words "needle" and "eyeball" in the same sentence. As a result, many patients opt for far less effective treatments. Now a team has found a way to provide this valuable therapy to the back of the eye with topical drops.
Blindness from both macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy are the result of blood vessels growing out of control behind the eye. The vessels are tamed with drugs that have to be brought to the tissues they are growing in. To avoid having to inject these drugs, researchers speculated that they might be able to make use of a drug-ferrying synthetic polymer with a peptide known as penetratin. They knew that the peptide had good permeability in the eye and speculated that pairing it with the polymer might allow drugs carried in this way to migrate to the rear of the eyeball. The team tested this out on rats and found that the complex rapidly migrated to the rear of their eyeballs in reasonable concentrations. Perhaps more importantly, they found that it stayed in the back of the eyeball for more than eight hours - long enough for the drugs to have their needed effect. This hideously complex research published in Applied Materials and Interfaces and, if you fancy trying to digest the original paper, you can do so here.
Oops
Boring to stare at but so important.
Image courtesy of the USGS.
Palaeontology matters. I know, as a palaeontologist myself I am most certainly biased, but let's face it, if we want to understand the sorts of conditions that the planet can throw at us in the future it is important (vital even) to know what it threw at our ancestors. Some of this ancient information can be gleaned by analysing the bones of impressive fossils like those of the dinosaurs but, more often than not, palaeontologists gaze at tiny* shelled organisms called foraminifera that float about in the sea and make food for themselves from sunlight. For decades, analysis of foraminfera shells have told us a great deal about what the chemistry of the ocean was like when they were alive. Now a new study is revealing that we've been making a terrible terrible error.
When researchers try to work out how old a fossil foraminifera shell is, they use the carbon in it to determine age. Known as carbon dating, this analysis method is straightforward as long as the carbon in the shell of the foraminifera is the same carbon that was put their by its cells during life. Normally, when an animal dies, there is no way for new carbon to make its way into its body but the team behind the new work is showing that this is not entirely true. When foraminifera die, their shells fall to the bottom of the ocean and ultimately get squashed under layers and layers of sediment. It turns out that this squashing process leads carbon from the surrounding environment to ooze into the foraminifera fossils and that this, in turn, badly throws off the techniques that we have been using to date them.
While you've probably never heard of formainifera before** this finding is a big deal and suggests that a huge chunk of our data on ancient climates is wrong. You can read more in The Economist article that I wrote on this here.
*And frankly, rather boring.
**Understandable of course given how unbelievably boring they are to stare at in lab