Have we Murder'd Sleep ?

Still it cried "Sleep no more!" to all the house 

"Glamis hath murder'd sleep and therefore Cawdor 

Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more!"

(Macbeth Act 2, Scene 2)

Greed and ambition robbed  Macbeth  ( and his Lady too) of his sleep. Among other things it played havoc with his  decision making capability and drove him to commit heinous crimes. Once mental peace is lost, sleep is hard to come and vice verse. ,  Then the vicious cycle starts and soon it is hard to say what was lost first, the sleep or the mental peace?  And so we use a general term Stress . Sleep deprivation doesn't add up as in simple arithmetic, we need to resort to complex mathematics to see the cumulative effect.  Recent issue of Nature (1)  has a special section on Sleep. 

Life evolved on earth with Sun the energy source as the sole reference point. Under nature's supervision work-life balance also evolved,  day light hours for work  and  night for sleep and rest.  The circadian clock was embedded in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), which took orders from the retina in the morning and  responded to the melatonin level build up after sunset. Melatonin is secreted by the pineal gland which preferentially works during the night shift.  Everything must have  gone on well, till Prometheus stole fire from the heaven and man realized that fire could be used not only to cook delicious food and keep warm but also to light up the dark night. From then on we have been trying to extend daylight hours, literally burning the midnight oil to make the night as bright as the day could be and the advent of electricity was the greatest triumph of all.  But that upset the carefully built in circadian clock within the human body.   

The circadian clock is delicately balanced by the interplay of  neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine,  , orexin, noradrenalin, serotonin, histamine, dopamine  etc during the " Arise awake" phase. When pineal gland senses no more light is coming through the retina,  it starts secreting melatonin which in turn gives the signal for the build up of a simple molecule gamma amino butyric acid or GABA for short. GABA  lulls us to sleep. But mind you,  all these neurotransmitters hold several other  jobs too.  Professor Charles Cziesler is convinced that artificial lighting has interfered with this delicate balance. Retina perhaps never experiences total darkness and that impairs the build up of melatonin. and hence GABA. But can we go back in time to be cave men, hunting by the day and sleeping by the night?  Of course not. Especially when we have learned to cross continents and time zones. So what is the quickfix? Sleep inducing pills? But they are not without side effects. 

Macbeth couldn't do much to get back his sleep, but we could and should. Can we be coached and coaxed into better sleep behavior?   Prof. Espie  is exploring the possibility of putting Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to use.  He has developed an online program called the Sleepio which aims to do exactly the same.  A  good night's sleep  could do wonders and could be a simple remedy for several ailments. That is why the crucial question of sleep hygiene is doing the rounds. To begin with, have you removed those audiovisual distractions  from your bedside?

Reference 

1. Sleep: Nature  23rd May 2013 vo. 497 pages S1-S20

Nature (still) Leads

With products  perfected over billions of years (of painstaking evolution), to suit  every tiny creature, in accordance with its unique  life style,  Nature never  ceases to amaze us. In her ever open house   unlimited treasures are  flung around with such joyous abandon   for us  to see,  to feel,  to experience and to learn and above all to mimic.  Two recent  research reports   reiterate this undeniable  truth further.

Karp etal (1) in their recent paper  discuss  a marvelous  biomedical adhesive, inspired by  Pomphorhynchus laevis,   indeed  too big a name for  a tiny parasitic  that infects fresh water fish.  But  once you realize how cleverly   it uses its head ( both  literally and figuratively ), you will concede the name. Since the parasite  has no hands nor feet to cling to its host, it uses  its proboscis, the elongated part of its head. Proboscis is an interesting word and  its genesis is from the Greek word proboscis( προβοσκίς ) which means, somewhat like move  forward to feed.  The clever  worm inserts its head which as an array of sharp nanotips into the host’s intestinal wall, the outer cover of the nanotips then swell, thus ensuring not only a well cushioned anchoring, but also smooth back tracking, whenever necessary.

  

Inspired and excited by this and the umpteen possibilities in soft tissue repair and restoration,   Karp's team    built a prototype. A  simple  elastomer sheet  with polystyrene spikes each with a  sheath of poly( styrene)- poly(acrylic acid) block copolymer. Acrylic acid is extremely hydrophilic and sticky  organic molecule; and poly (acrylic acid) is even more so.  In fact  poly (acrylic acid) is the predominant segment in  most of the super absorbent polymers.  So the sheath takes up water, swells and sticks in place.    Now imagine the immediate   possibilities : first  medicating the hydrogel sheath, next controlling the pore size of the hydrogel for controlled  drug delivery, then  built-in mechanism for timed hydration and subsequent dehydration of the sheath so that the spike naturally falls of like a dry leaf.   .

Arthropods (houseflies, ants, bees etc.) are invertebrates with segmented bodies.  This  tribe,  has been taunting mankind for long,   with their  compound eye. A Compound eye is made up  of a  cluster of small simple eyes  (singular ommatidium, plural ommatidia).    Ommatidia may lack the fine resolution  of the mammalian eye,  but  it bestows  a  panoramic view with unlimited depth of vision low aberration and  above all instantaneous ability to detect motion,  features extremely desirable in cameras.  But then you need  hemispherically configured   imaging elements to achieve this.   Even the latest digital cameras work on principles of  planar sensors and conventional optics.   

  

                                                         Ommatidia of the arthropod

The team demonstrates ”how a camera can accurately and simultaneously render pictures  of multiple objects in a field of view , even at widely different angular positions and distances.”A  cross disciplinary global team has surmounted the difficulties(2) by combining the advantages of  stretchable electronics with hemispherical photodetector arrays.   The prototype  digital camera has tiny lenses molded out of a flexible sheet of  poly (dimethylsiloxane, PDMS for short), connected to a  stretchable  mesh  of silicon photodiodes and blocking diodes appropriately placed and connected with  whiskers of metal embedded polyimides. Each Microlens  with its own photodetector and electrical connections  is equivalent to an  ommatidium and the manmade ommatidia might roughly look like the  bubble wrap, but several orders of magnitude smaller.  A perforated black silicon cap over the microlens array and a black support below the assembly effectively cuts off stray light. The team has demonstrated ”how a camera can accurately and simultaneously render pictures  of multiple objects in a field of view , even at widely different angular positions and distances.”

1. "A bio-inspired swellable microneedle adhesive for mechanical interlocking with tissue". Nature Communications  4 (1702). April 2013.

2. Digital cameras with designs  inspired by the arthropod eye. Song et al Nature  , 497, 95-99. 2^nd May 2013

Scientific Misconduct : Is there a gender bias?

It has become a routine affair to celebrate  International Women’s Day on the 8th of March.  Several scientific  magazines carried  special sections highlighting  the  challenges faced by hiring authorities as well as  by women scientists.  Proportion of women   in  the scientific community  is moving up at snail's space.   It is becoming increasingly hard not only  to attract  but also  retain women in science.    Of course there are a few , with a Will of their own, self motivated or encouraged by teachers,parents or mentors   who seem to find a way, in spite of all  obstacles.  But  what  is it that  restrains  women from  opting for a scientific carrier ?      Valian’s book aptly titled Why so slow? makes   quite an interesting reading, in this context(1).  She states that “adults often misperceive and misevaluate each other often  underrating  women and overrating  men,” and argues for the necessity to  look beyond the XX and XY chromosomes and associated hormones.  

It was more than a 100 years ago that Marie Curie  received her  Nobel Prize. Since its inception ,  839 individuals , across all disciplines have received the  Prize,  among them  only 44 are women (counting Mme Curie twice), a mere 5 %. In every which way you try to take a sample, males are overrepresented. Is it because as Valian says women are underrated and men are overrated ? Or  isn't this a mere reflection of the skewed gender ratio within the scientific community? (We will repeat these questions again).    The brightly lit stage of honor, glory and recognition on which the scientific achievers  share space   has an equally intense and dark underbelly, which houses  the fraudsters, cheaters and other criminally minded. What is the female representation there?   Here is a partial answer  “Males are overrepresented among life science researchers  committing scientific misconduct. ” (2)   Fang  et al had come to this conclusion   after  pouring over  two decades  of data on scientific misconduct, procured  from the United States Office of Research  Integrity. Of the 215 cases  put under the scanner Fang and his team  found that 65%  were committed by  male. Time for us to repeat the question:  Isn't this a mere reflection of the skewed gender ratio within the scientific community?   Fang et al don’t  discount that altogether. They do admit the sample size is too small  to warrant generalizations. 

Anna Kaatz  is a postdoctoral research  associate  and    is probing     why so many women researchers  quit biomedical research careers. She would like to understand the  undercurrents, if any, of unconscious gender biases  which might put female research scientists  at a disadvantage. In a follow up study  Kaatz et al  ask the provocative question “Are men more likely to commit scientific misconduct ?”(3) How do female scientists  cope with professional pressures  at workplace?. Ambitious and competent,  how do they  respond and react to the temptations   to  forge, to misrepresent   or to cosmetize the scientific  data?, In other words, whatever be the motivations and temptations, does  the tendency  to engage in  scientific misconduct  have   clear gender based   divergence ?  Kaatz et al  too are  noncommittal  as  they conclude “Maybe, Maybe not.”   

A few  very pertinent, though inconvenient questions need to be answered here. Could  it be that , when it comes to scientific  misconduct  just as  in achievement,    male is overrated and  female underrated?   Does the overwhelmingly  male scientific community  brush aside female offenders as inconsequential  the same way   they do   the female achievers?  Or does the scientific community condone  female scientists more easily than male scientists?   Alas as of now we don't have answers, but someday someone will find the answers. 

Let us   move out of the narrow  and restrictive confines of the scientific community  into the  wider crime space;  do we get a clearer picture? Freda Adler emeritus professor at The Rutgers University School of Criminal Justice noted way back in 1977 that   “as a result of the push towards equality of the genders, more women entered the workforce and the political arena, reducing the gap between the genders in terms of power, pay, and social standing”.    To her it has been a foregone conclusion that gender equity can’t be confined to work space alone, it will inevitably  pervade every social space including the crime zone. This concept  is  popularly  known as the   hypothesis of convergence. Adler was forthright when she prognosticated that    “If present social trends continue women will be sharing with men not only ulcers, coronaries, hypertension, and lung cancer (until recently considered almost exclusively masculine diseases) but will also compete increasing in such traditionally male criminal activities as crimes against the person, more aggressive property offenses, and especially white-collar crime” .

References:

1. Why so slow : Academic advancement of Women(1998) ,by Virginia Valian, MIT Press, ISBN 9780262720311
2. . Males are overrepresented among life science researchers committing scientific misconduct

3. Are Men more likely than women to conduct scientific misconduct? Maybe, Maybe Not

Bosphorus, Istanbul 12th May 2013

Of Bees and Flowers

After all, bees and flies aren’t as dumb  as we thought, nor  flowers  naive.  Did you know that the flower petal is like a touch screen?  Only,  we don’t know how to decode the responses.  But bees and flies are much smarter and they know  how to  carry out   small talk with  flowers.   In brief  such  electrical interactions facilitate communication between   flowers and their  pollinators.

As early as 1900’s Jagadish Chandra Bose had detected the electrical activity in plants.   Compilation of  his findings could be found in his  book RESPONSE IN THE LIVING  AND NON-LIVING written in 1902 ( currently available on line , thanks to gutenberg projectt ). Plant electrophysiology  has since then developed into a very interesting and active area of research.  April 8^th issue of Science  carries a paper by Clarke  et al   which   describes how bumble bees can detect,  read and respond to  floral electric fields.  In combination with color,  texture, scent and  nectar,   the electrical impulses are powerful  signals which  greatly influence the bee behavior.

Normally bees carry a slight positive charge and the flower petals complement with a mild negative charge.  With very sensitive and specialized  instruments Clarke and his team  measured the  charge  carried by the bees. Of the 51 bees   94% of bees were positively charged as expected but  6% proved to be rebels, they carried a  negative charge.( I am certain, experiments are on way to understand more about this rebel group).  An equally delicate set up  was used to  monitor the electrical signature of the flowers. For field trials  the  conformists were let out into a  field of petunias. Averaged over  about 50 bee touch downs,   the team  registered a maximum  value of 25mV  which lasted for roughly 100 seconds in a flower.  In addition the team was amazed at the quickness of the petal   response which occurred within seconds. Perhaps  an instant  signal  to  other visitors that they are not welcome?.

The researchers tried to tempt and confuse  the bees with artificial flowers, which had  steel stems and plastic petals.  Two sets were considered.  One set carried the minimal biologically relevant  electric field  and also sucrose solution as substitute for nectar.   The other set was dummy, no electrical signal and the  sugar solution was replaced with bitter quinine solution.  Naturally bees flocked to the  charged  plastic  flowers. But when both sets were grounded  bereft of a " come, hither" signal the bees strayed away .

Well that is not the end of the story. While reading this paper I was reminded of  another one  which had appeared a month ago on how clever and crafty  the  dainty flowers could be. Wright leading a team  comprising of members from both sides of Atlantic  was intrigued by the presence of  minute amounts of caffeine  in the nectar of  citrus  and  coffee  flowers.  Copious secretion of such bitter alkaloids  is an evolutionary trick perfected by plants to ward of herbivores. But  why traces of it  in the nectar? Within the citrus family Wright and team focused on   grapefruit, pomelo,  and orange blossoms and  among the coffee family  Arabica, liberica and canephora.   They began with the assumption that by providing nectar laced with caffeine, the flowers might be enticing  the bees to return to them, in  other words ensuring  their fidelity. Seems like stretching  a bit too much, isn’t it ?  Well not at all.  Their  carefully controlled experiments  proved  precisely  the same  assumption. I suggest you read the whole paper to fully appreciate  the very logical and time consuming experiments.  

Tailpiece

Did you know  fruit flies  immunize their off springs  at larval stage against possible parasites?.  When mother flies suspect  such a  possibility, they lay their eggs in an alcohol enriched medium. Prof  Prof Schlenke is a pioneer in this field 

1. Detection and Learning of Floral Electric Fields by Bumblebees  D. Clarke   et al Science 5 April 2013: Vol. 340 no. 6128 pp. 66-69 

2.Caffeine in Floral Nectar Enhances a Pollinator's Memory of Reward:                                        G. A. Wright et al Science 8 March 2013: Vol. 339 no. 6124 pp. 1202-1204

3. Fruit flies medicate offspring after seeing parasites                                                                  

Kacsoh etal Science  22 February 2013 Vol.339,  6122, pp 947-950

 

 

 

 

 

Origins of the Loftiest and the Lowliest

 Well,  not so loftiest and not so lowliest  after all, but in comparison still acceptable. The loftiest is  about our Moon. According to the generally accepted Giant Impact Hypothesis  Moon was born roughly 4-5 billion years ago when    some heavenly body collided with Mother Earth , while both were rather  jellylike on the exterior.  For ease of referencing and  interpretation the  unknown heavenly body  was named Theia, in scientific circles ; all for good reason. In Greek mythology,  Theia the titan, is the mother of the lovely Selene, our Moon   So in lighter vein  we are investigating a Hit and Run case between Theia and Gaia ( Gaia is the Greek name for Mother Earth) which formed Selene

But unfortunately we are approximately 5 billion years late.   Crime scene is no longer the same. But so what? Positive way of thinking  is that we have 5 billion years’ of accumulated evidence and  the  investigating team has very powerful tools and techniques . True,  there is,  as of now,  no trace of Theia, but Gaia and Selene might still  be capable of providing  useful  information?   Can they answer 3 critical  questions: How big was Theia,  what was she made up of  and how fast she was spinning?  

So we now put together the pieces of evidence.  Selene is 1/4^th the size and 1/100^th the mass of Gaia.   If we leave aside the inner core of Gaia,  both have roughly the same chemical makeup., except that the  Selene has a lower density. This leads to several possibilities:    either Theia too had an almost similar composition or Theia was too small  to have  caused any  variation in the compositional variation. Canup (Planetary Science Directorate, Southwest Research Institute Boulder Colorado) would like to believe the former possibility and present computational  data in support. On the other hand   Cuk and Stewart (Planetary Sciences Dept. of Harvard University)   argue in favor of the second possibility.  Both agree that the angular momentum  issue  could be easily settled by taking into consideration the synchronization within the Solar system.  So in any case the  question is still far from settled and we can expect more on this.  

Now let us look at something more mundane,   the  humble  Chicken.  It was Charles Darwin’s hypothesis  that the  origins of  the current domesticated chicken could be traced to  the red jungle fowl who wandered along a rather wide stretch of land from the the foot hills of Himalayas to the  Sumatran islands. It is indeed a great pity that the  Gallus gallus,  the majestic, colorful  red jungle rooster   lost  its regal get up along the path of domestication to yield the current nondescript chickens. The  shiny and thick  glistening orange mane,  burnt red feathers covering most of its body  with streaks of  iridiscent blue or green,     the carelessly  bunched up tail of shiny black feathers.  All gone  and    Gallus gallus of the wild type is an endangered species now.  

The majestic wild rooster Courtsey: wikipedia

   

But the question remains: exactly  where, when and how was the  Gallus gallus of the wild type domesticated.?  Geneticists, ecologists and surprisingly enough archaeologists have come together to  solve this puzzle.

Tailpiece:

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Do visit  https://www.dognition.com/brian-hare

References

11.   Origin of the Moon A.N Halliday, Science Vo. 338, 23 November, p 1040-1041

  2. Making the Moon from the fast Spinning Earth : Cuk & Stewart Science Vol. 338, 23 November, p 1047-1051

  3.  Forming Moon with earth-like composition via giant impact : Canup, Science Vo. 338, 23 November, p 1052-1055

   4.    In search of the wild chicken A. Lawler Science Vol. 338, 23 November, p 1020-1024

And Here Comes Genetically Engineered IT

Hold your breath, we might be in for a paradigm shift in the domain of Information Technology.     If you give it a bit ( pun intended) of thought, Genetically Engineered Information Technology,     is not new at all, and in fact is  as old as  life itself. Sixty years ago,  Watson and Crick unraveled the mystery of the  DNA double helix,  its enormous capacity  for information coding as well as storage and replication.   So technically speaking you and I are Dynamic  Information Storage,  Retrieval,  Application  Systems. Yes, Dynamic indeed; information is constantly being upgraded; reprocessed, put into use...............  without  even having  to press any UPDATE/ delete  button.  . Of course there is a hitch:     convenient and  selective  loss of memory. 

DNA Double Helix 

Quite a lot happened during  the last 60 years. We were initially quite taken aback to note that a mere 4 letter code says all that is to be said in the Universe.  Strange indeed,  but haven’t we ourselves admitted long back that Truth is stranger than Fiction ? Speaking, reading and writing  a language requires increasing levels of  capability and sure  enough we  mastered the DNA  language, learned to decode  the mysterious messages   and and write  some of our own.  Genetically modified  brinjal being an example.  And now we are all set to  exploit this new method in the IT world.  We  have  learned that DNA is practically indestructible  and even after millions of  years the stored  information can be retrieved.  Logically , then  why can't we do away with the current data storage devices  and switch to DNA ?   

With this idea in mind,  Nick Goldman  with his team at the European Bioinformatics Institute at the  European Molecular Biology Laboratory,  Hinxton U.K  collaborated  with  those at the Agilent Technologies Genomics Lab at Santa Clara, California.   They  have come up with a practical guide to exploiting the universality  and robustness of   DNA as an information storage system. To prove beyond doubt the versatility and efficacy of their method the team chose 5 different forms of data:  ASCII text  of all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, MP3 format of the  26 minute’s speech of Martin Luther King’s I have a dream speech,   and .pdf format of Watson & Cricks famous 1953 Nature paper on DNA double helix  and a .jpg photo file of the EMBL  building summing upto little less than 800 kilobytes.  Nick Goldman  told BBC  that one gram of DNA can store up to 2 petabytes of information the equivalent of 3 million CDs.   Their research  paper is published in Nature Magazine online on 23 January 2013.  As Dr Ewan Birney  another team member opined to the BBC “ One of the great properties of DNA is that you don’t  need any electricity to store it. If you keep it cold dark and dry, DNA lasts for a very long time” –  Didn’t Jurrassic Park tell us precisely that?  So unlike  the conventional  storage devices  DNA  storage system will not demand constant attention.

Can this synthetic IT DNA t in anyway interfere with Nature’s life code? The team sets at rest, our   apprehensions. Goldman told the BBC that  though it uses the  4 letters ATGC,  “ The IT DNA  uses a completely different  code to what the cells of living bodies use”    
References : 
Nature Magazine published online 23rd January 2013. 

Ageing Gracefully

Ageing Gracefully

“Lived happily ever after “ is stuff of  fairy tales, no doubt.  However,  advances in biomedical sciences have done exceedingly well to improve longevity.   Well,  as of now “ever” is timed and the maximum is capped at 122 years. Human  curiosity  to understand and  thereby suppress the onset of   senescence  has been   historical and  science  has always helped in clearing the path forward.  Imagine Cinderella to be  at the  over super ripe  age of  120.  She  would have excellent eyesight, thanks to the  jelly like  intraoccular  lens inserted after the  cataract surgery,   would most probably be agile enough with   brand new knee / hip joints,, a few transplanted  organs….etc….   Sure she will  still recognize her Prince charming, would remember the glass slippers that shaped her life,  but  would be unable  to remember why just then she summoned  her maid.  ( Well all these  are applicable to Prince too.)

Amour (Love)    a film  by director Michale Haneke could very well be the story of Cinderella and her Prince. The film, which won Palme d’ Or  at the 2012 Cannes Festival,  was screened during the  recent  international  film festival at  Bangalore.  It is the story of an elderly couple, Anne and Georges. Pathos of  unstoppable old age and  the accompanying  trauma which can’t be wished away .  

 6^th December issue of Nature   has a special section  , sponsored by Nestle,  on Ageing.   A cluster of nine articles spread over 25 pages  explore   multiple aspects of ageing.   Quite interesting is the COBRA ( short for , Cognition, Brain and Ageing ) project, which  aims to monitor the ageing process of senior citizens for at least a decade. .  Volunteers for the study are in the 60+ age group. The study is prompted by the undeniable demographic data.  50 years ago age versus   population   plot looked like an upside down ice cream  cone, but now it is more like an upside down  Chinese soup bowl.  Average age of the global population is increasing  and more specifically population density in the 60+ segment is increasing even faster.  Naturally, both science and society need to be conscious about this  fact and take measures to confront. Professor  Lars Backman who leads the COBRA program at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm   is confident, even if the path forward is arduous, the effort will be fruitful. His focus is “ Healthy Cognitive Ageing”  One of the key factors he is focusing on is  dopamine, a very important  neurotransmitter equally important in  physical   agility and learning. Dopamine level dip with age. He is asking the most important question:  Are there ways and means to push it up?  

Is old age inevitable ? Professor Caleb Finch Director of the Gerontology Research Institute at the University of Southern California  and his team are  enamored  with turtles and tortoises which  can live close to 200 years. Perhaps they might yield a clue?

The Centre for Eldercare and Rehabilitation Technology at the University of Missouri is focusing on user friendly gadgets  to assist  and enable  people to age gracefully, without having to compromise too much on the quality of life. Professor Eva Kahana  Director of the Elderly Care Research Center at the Case Western Reserve University would like to describe it rather as Ageing Proactively.

All said and done, perhaps  there is an age old recipe for longevity, and that is   starving ( or fasting, if you prefer it that way) .  Professor Luigi Fontana  is convinced that reducing  calorific  intake is the best way to interfere with ageing. This has been proved in laboratory animals.  Are we humans ready to retry this way  out  ?