This week on radio, Tim Thwaites is talking about arsenic-eating microbes; vegetarian pandas; frog pee; the swine flu wash-up; and more
Australian Institute of Physics Congress—800 physicists are meeting in the Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre this week. Why should we care? Well, these are the guys who brought you microchips, iPhones, plasma TVs, MRI scans, solar cells, lasers, USB sticks and a whole lot more. And they’ve been talking about space weather, belting atoms together till they tell us where they came from, using diamonds in bionic eyes, and watching the movement of electrons.
Arsenic-eating microbe may redefine the chemistry of life A bacterium found in the arsenic-filled waters of a Californian lake is poised to overturn our understanding of the biochemistry of living organisms. Far from being poisoned, it seems to be able to replace phosphorous with arsenic in some of its basic processes—suggesting a life form very different from the one we know.—Science
A Nature story on this topic can be found at http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101202/full/news.2010.645.html
More species means less disease—Conserving biodiversity while reducing animal contact with humans can limit the spread of infectious disease, American researchers have found. The effect is consistent across the 12 diseases they studied, but they don’t know why it occurs.—Nature
A Nature story on this topic can be found at http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101201/full/news.2010.644.html
Exposure to seasonal flu weakened the immunity armour against swine flu—One of the puzzles of the swine flu pandemic, which caused thousands of death worldwide, was that the healthy middle-aged people were hardest hit, not the old and the young. An American study has shown that the immune system was primed by exposure to seasonal influenza to harm its own body rather than mobilise against swine flu.—Nature Medicine
A Nature story on this topic can be found at http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101205/full/news.2010.649.html
Foreign object inside your body? Just pee it out—Frogs can absorb foreign objects into their bladders and urinate them out, a Darwin researcher has found. He discovered that the frogs’ bladder tissue responds to a foreign object by growing out, surrounding it and pulling it into the organ.—Biology Letters
A New Scientist story on this topic can be found at http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19824-implanted-foreign-object-pee-it-out.html
How the giant panda lost its taste for flesh—Researchers in the US suggest that the panda’s famous bamboo vegetarianism, may have something to do with an inactive gene for taste.—New Scientist
A New Scientist story on this topic can be found at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827893.900-how-the-giant-panda-lost-its-taste-for-flesh.html