Category: science

A newly-discovered species of spider, found in Madagascar, apparently spins the world’s largest webs – they span more than 25  meters, or 82 feet (80 percent of the length of an average-sized blue whale!). From the BBC:

The spider also makes the largest orb web yet found for any spider,
and constructs it out of the most tough biomaterial yet known, say
scientists.

Darwin’s bark spider, a species new to science, weaves its huge web over flowing rivers, stretching from bank to bank.

It is so big that it can catch 30 or more prey insects at any one time.

Darwin’s bark spider weaves what experts call an orb web, the most familiar spider web design

But this web is unusual as it is the largest orb web yet known to be
made by any living spider, with the largest web measuring 2.8m².

You can read and see more here.

About a month ago, health officials announced the discovery of an Indian “superbug,” otherwise-common bacteria carrying profound resistance to nearly every antibiotic available. This “superbug” isn’t a single particular type of bacterium; rather, it’s a host of different bacteria that all possess a specific gene, called NDM-1 (short for New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase), that confers “dire” resistance factors on whatever bacteria happen to possess it. A recap from Wired Science:

NDM-1 was first spotted in 2008,
in a 59-year-old man of South Asian origin who lived in

Image via Wikipedia

Sweden. He was
hospitalized on a visit home to New Delhi, had surgery, recovered, went
back to Sweden and was hospitalized there again. At that point,
physicians recognized that he had a urinary tract infection that was
unusually drug-resistant. The infection was caused by a common
bacterium, Klebsiella pneumoniae, but the Klebsiella
possessed an unusual and worrisome ability to disable carbapenems, a
class of drugs given for very resistant infections. They named the
enzyme and the gene directing its production for the place where the man
had apparently acquired it: New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase, and bla_NDM.
In 2009, the United Kingdom’s public-health agency sent out an alert
saying the same resistance mechanism was appearing there and increasing
rapidly, going from unknown in 2007 to 18 instances in the first half
of 2009, most of them in people who had gone to India for medical care
or had frequent family travel back and forth. In June this year, the US
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put out a bulletin about
NDM-1’s first US appearance,
in three patients in three different states (California, Massachusetts
and Illinois), again with ties to South Asian medical care.

It turns out that bacteria carrying the NDM-1 gene have spread around the world. Meanwhile, home-grown superbugs with resistances of their own have been found in 35 different states. Even more troubling: they render ineffective even our “last ditch” treatments for other infections that won’t respond to standard antibiotics. From USA Today:

“We’ve lost our drug of last resort,” Fishman [director of infection control and epidemiology at the University of
Pennsylvania and president of the Society of Healthcare Epidemiologists] says.

Doctors say the bacteria are more worrisome than another well-known
superbug, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), because
more drugs are available to treat MRSA, Fishman says. “When MRSA started
to develop 15 years ago, the industry started producing antibiotics now
coming onto the market,” he says. “We’re in the same position with KPCs
as we were with staph aureus 15 years ago, except that the
pharmaceutical industry isn’t rushing to produce new drugs.”

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Scientists, scholars, and other whistle-blowers have been warning us for some time that our overuse of antibiotics – particularly on factory farms, where drugs are dispensed en masse to healthy animals to prevent infections in unsanitary conditions – could give rise to something particularly nasty. Really, you could call this a classic tale of scientific overreaching – like Frankenstein’s monster, our hubris is coming back to haunt us.
It turns out this is exactly what is happening: Minnesota, one state that is currently beset by its own set of drug-resistant superbugs, tracked their origin to livestock production facilities.

Now, it’s easy to dismiss all of this with a wave of the hand. “So we’ve got these so-called superbugs – big deal, it’s just the new H1N1, which was the new SARS, which was the new…” ad infinitum. Maybe, but maybe not – things get unsettling when we venture into the realm of drug resistance. And you can’t be too careful – it’s better to avoid a devastating global pandemic, as I always say.

… is a specially-designed room in Minnesota at Orfield Laboratories Inc. Intrigued? Read on:

How does one achieve The Quietest Place on Earth? Start with a room
within a room, within a room: the Orfield Labs six sided anechoic
chamber is a small room floating in a pit on I-beams that are on top of
springs. A five sided chamber of identical construction surrounds it on
the edge of the pit. Both chambers are made of double wall
steel-insulation-steel. The anechoic chamber was manufactured by Eckel, the largest anechoic chamber builder in the country.

Both
steel chambers are held within a larger room that was built with solid
one foot thick concrete walls and ceiling panels. The smaller room is
filled with 3.3 feet thick fiberglass acoustic wedges. This approach led
to the anechoic chamber found at Orfield Labs being measured by
engineers on January 21st of 2004 at negative 9.4 dB (with A-weighting),
thus earning it the title of Quietest Place on Earth. By comparison,
the low threshold for human hearing is considered to be 0 dB.

The room is, in fact, the Guinness World Record holder for the quietest place on Earth. You can read the original article here. But please remember, silence is golden.

Image via Wikipedia

It sounds incredible, but apparently it’s true – in the 1970s, scientists discovered evidence of two billion year old nuclear reactors in Africa.

These reactors weren’t built by aliens or now-lost Atlanteans, of course – they occurred naturally. It turns out that billions of years ago, uranium was present in the earth’s crust in sufficient quantities to spontaneously undergo fission, given certain other prerequisites. From Scientific American:

Paul K. Kuroda, a chemist from the University of Arkansas,
calculated what it would take for a uraniumore body
spontaneously to undergo selfsustained fission. Amazingly, the actual conditions that prevailed two billion years
ago in what researchers eventually determined to be 16 separate
areas within the Oklo and adjacent Okelobondo uranium mines were
very close to what Kuroda outlined. These zones were all identified
decades ago.

You can read the full article here. It concludes, interestingly, that there may have been yet other naturally-occurring nuclear reactors in our planet’s past. Go figure.

Have you ever wondered how many bugs are floating around in the atmosphere above you? I have, but maybe I’m just weird. Either way, there’s finally an answer to this question: around 3 billion bugs per month (bpm). NPR reports:

When British scientist Jason Chapman told us (listen to the radio piece
or watch our video) there are 3 billion insects passing over your head
in a summer month, he was talking about his survey in Great Britain.
Closer to the equator, he says, the numbers should rise. He wouldn’t be
surprised, for example, that in the sky over Houston or New Orleans
there could be 6 billion critters passing overhead in a month.

Why are they up there? The article goes on:

Sometimes insects and spiders need to leave where they are and go
someplace else for food, for sex, for space. For a variety of reasons
bugs disperse.

Bugs have been found over the Atlantic “at 2,460 to 5,410 feet and over Greenland at 7,870 to 12,135 feet”; the record-holder is a single termite that was captured at 19,000 feet.

You can read more here.

Apparently, an outbreak of Whooping Cough (also known as pertussis) is currently afflicting California. This is particularly shocking because, as the article notes below, Whooping Cough is “almost completely preventable” and the vaccination is readily accessible. From Discover Magazine:

According to a
statement just released by the California Department of Public
Health, pertussis — whooping cough — is now officially an epidemic in
California.

That’s right: an almost completely preventable disease is coming back
with a roar in California. There have been well over 900 cases
of pertussis in that state this year, over four times as many
as this time last year (and 600 more suspected cases are being
investigated). If this keeps up, California may see more cases in 2010
than it has in 50 years.

If that doesn’t anger and sicken you enough, then this most assuredly
will: there have been five deaths this year from pertussis as well, all
babies under three months of age.


Infants aren’t fully protected against pertussis until they have
completed the first schedule of vaccinations, when they reach 6 months.
Before then, they are vulnerable to the disease. The most likely
reservoir for the bacterium? Unvaccinated people, including other
children. If too many people go unvaccinated, the disease can find a
host and survive long enough to infect others. If enough people are
vaccinated, that chance drops. This effect is called herd immunity,
and it’s the only thing that can keep this highly contagious and
potentially fatal disease away from infants.

The article goes on to speculate that this may be related to the recent spat of anti-vaccination efforts (many of which were prompted by the faulty, biased study that falsely linked autism to vaccinations). You can read more here.