Virginia Hughes » History

Family Ties

virginiahughes — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 12:35:31 +0000

It’s been almost a year since I wrote about my genetic testing results from 23andMe. That’s because, despite paying $5 a month for the site’s mandatory Personal Genome Service®, I rarely look at it.

It’s not that I’m scared of the data (been there), and not because I forgot — every six or eight weeks I get an email from the company saying things like, You have 8 new results from 23andMe! New discoveries have been made about your DNA! I hadn’t visited the site because, frankly, I was bored of it. How many times is one expected to look sort-of-interesting, sort-of-meaningless risk calculations and ponder healthier ways to live?

Then at a conference last week, while trying to make small talk with a scientist, I mentioned my 23andMe subscription. Turns out he has one, too. “Isn’t it funny when you get those messages from your distant relatives?” he said. I told him I didn’t know what he meant. “I get them all the time,” he said, shaking his head.

Read more at…

The Last Word on Nothing, March 2012.

Filed under: 2012, Blogging, Genetics, Health and Medicine, History, The Last Word on Nothing

Climate Change’s Latest Victim: Ice Hockey

virginiahughes — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 15:39:47 +0000

You’ve no doubt heard about the myriad effects of rising global temperatures: droughts, drying rivers,lowland floods, plummeting populations of polar bears and Emperor penguins, coastal storms putting Arctic villages in mortal danger. Now there’s a new victim: the future of Canadian ice hockey.

To those of us who don’t follow sports, it might seem like a silly thing to fret over. But ice hockey is actually quite important to the culture and economy of Canada. The first organized game of indoor hockey, in 1875, took place in Montreal. When the country sent its first astronaut into space, he took a hockey stick and puck with him. Every year, according to one report, more than one-fifth of the country’s adult population attends or plays in an ice hockey game.

Because a lot of this hockey fun takes place in outdoor ice rinks, the scientists behind the new study wondered if the sport has been influenced by the changing climate. Since 1950, average winter temperatures in Canada have gone up 2.5 degrees Celsius, while the duration and intensity of cold spells have decreased.

Filed under: 2012, Blogging, Earth and Space, History, Smithsonian

Trees Weathered the Ice Age

virginiahughes — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 16:18:08 +0000

During the last glacial period, from about 100,000 to 12,000 years ago, most northern parts of the world were covered in sheets of ice, wiping out any possibility of vegetation.

Well, not quite. It seems that pine and spruce trees, at least, were able to survive in certain spots in Scandinavia, according to DNA analyses reported in today’s issue of Science.

Filed under: 2012, Blogging, Ecology, History, Smithsonian

Arabic Manuscripts: It Used to Snow in Iraq

virginiahughes — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 15:15:10 +0000

How do scientists reconstruct the climate of the past? They often turn to ice cores or growth rings from trees or deep-sea corals. But a new study gleans a wealth of weather intel from a largely untapped source: old documents.

Researchers from Spain scoured manuscripts from 9th- and 10th-century Baghdad, in modern-day Iraq, for references to the weather. Baghdad, where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers meet, was at that time the new and bustling capital of the vast Islamic Empire, which stretched from India to the Atlantic Ocean. Much was written about the city and why it was chosen as the capital, including its population size, agricultural potential and climate.

In the 10 analyzed texts, most of which give exhaustive political histories of the region, the researchers found 55 meteorological citations, many of which were referring to the same event. The study points out that although the social and religious content of the documents is probably biased, the historians weren’t likely to fabricate an off-hand mention of a drought, hail storm or solar eclipse.

Filed under: 2012, Blogging, Earth and Space, Ecology, History, Smithsonian

Oldest American Rock Art Found in Brazil

virginiahughes — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 15:04:57 +0000

For the past 10 years or so, there’s been a surge of interest among archaeologists in the people who discovered the New World. Most of the buzz revolves around when, exactly, those nomads crossed the Bering land bridge into Alaska, with a focus on the distinctive stone tools they used. Nobody talks much about the artistic leanings of the first Americans, simply because examples of their cave paintings, jewelry or other symbolic creations are few and far between.

But in July 2009, after seven years of excavation work, researchers found a humble stick figure engraved in bedrock in Lapa do Santo, in central Brazil. In their report, published yesterday in PLoS ONE, the scientists call it the “oldest, indisputable testimony of rock art in the Americas.”

Filed under: 2012, Anthropology, Blogging, Forensics, History, Smithsonian

Dry Spells

virginiahughes — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:29:41 +0000

In the spring of the year 73, thousands of Roman soldiers raided Masada, a fortress on top of a cliff in the Judean Desert. For seven years, the Jews had tried, unsuccessfully, to split from the Roman empire, and Masada was the last holdout. According to the ancient historian Josephus, when the Romans breached Masada’s walls, they found 960 dead bodies of Jewish extremists, called Sicarii, who had killed themselves to avoid the inevitable enslavement. Because of Masada’s remote location and harsh, dry climate, nothing much happened to the site for the next 2,000 years, until archaeologists started digging it up in 1963. They found attack ramps and siege towers (some of the best examples we have, apparently, of Roman war technologies), palaces, cisterns, swimming pools, 27 human skeletons and, deep under the rubble, a handful of seeds.

The seeds were stored at room temperature until 2005, when scientists performed radiocarbon dating and identified them as the famed date palm of Judea. (Psalm 92: “The righteous will flourish like a palm tree…They will still bear fruit in old age, they will stay fresh and green.”) The researchers planted the remaining three seeds. One of them grew. When the results were published, in 2008, the plant, nicknamed Methuselah, was more than three feet tall. By this past November, it was more than six feet tall, and healthy enough to be moved out of quarantine and into a park.

No one knows exactly how the seeds managed to survive so long, but it almost certainly had to do with the extremely high temperatures and low humidity of the desert. Methuselah is just one of many examples of organisms that can preserve themselves by shutting down for awhile. In the winter, the wood frog’s heart stops beating and up to 45 percent of its body turns to ice. The tardigrade, a microscopic eight-legged ‘waterbear’, can survive at least 10 years in a cold environment by expelling nearly all of the water from its body.

“Nature is very wise at solving these problems,” says cryobiologist Amir Arav, whose company, Core Dynamics, is based about 85 miles from Masada. For nearly 30 years, Arav has been trying to mimic nature’s preservation feats in the lab. He has frozen rat livers and hearts, and sheep ovaries, and has freeze-dried human sperm, knee cartilage, stem cells and blood.

Read more at…

The Last Word on Nothing, January 2012.

Filed under: 2012, Blogging, Business and Technology, Health and Medicine, History, Reproductive Biology, The Last Word on Nothing

Researchers Tap Century-Old Brain Tissue for Clues to Mental Illness

virginiahughes — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:09:58 +0000

Among the bloodletting boxes, ether inhalers, kangaroo-tendon sutures and other artifacts stored at the Indiana Medical History Museum in Indianapolis are hundreds of scuffed-up canning jars full of dingy yellow liquid and chunks of human brains.

Until the late 1960s the museum was the pathology department of the Central Indiana Hospital for the Insane. The bits of brain in the jars were collected during patient autopsies performed between 1896 and 1938. Most of the jars sat on a shelf until the summer of 2010, when Indiana University School of Medicine pathologist George Sandusky began popping off the lids.

Frustrated by a dearth of postmortem brain donations from people with mental illness, Sandusky—who is on the board of directors at the museum—seized the chance to search this neglected collection for genes that contribute to mental disorders.

Sandusky is not alone. Several research groups are now seeking ways to mine genetic and other information hidden in old, often forgotten tissue archives—a handful of which can be found in the U.S., along with many more in Europe. Several technical hurdles stand in the way, but if these can be overcome, the archives would offer several advantages. Beyond supplying tissues that can be hard to acquire at a time when autopsies are on the decline, the vintage brains are untainted by modern psychiatric drugs and are often paired with detailed clinical notes that help researchers make more accurate post hoc diagnoses.

“There are probably a fair number of these collections around the country that grew out of state hospitals,” says John Allman, professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology. “It is an untapped resource. If it were carefully planned and reasonably funded, it could become quite a valuable thing.”

Read more at…

Scientific American, January 2012.

Filed under: 2012, Brain Science, Genetics, Health and Medicine, History, News, Scientific American

Book Review: Autism’s Twisted Immune Links, Untangled

virginiahughes — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 17:00:03 +0000

Julius Wagner-Jauregg treated several men with psychosis by exposing them to malaria, and won a Nobel Prize for the work.

In the summer of 1917, an Austrian doctor named Julius Wagner-Jauregg gave a man with advanced symptoms of syphilis, including psychotic episodes, a very peculiar treatment: malaria.

The parasitic infection causes fever, and Wagner-Jauregg had a theory that fever treatment, or ‘pyrotherapy,’ could cure psychosis. The doctor injected the man with blood drawn from a soldier with malaria. Within weeks, as expected, this brought on episodes of fever. After the sixth fever, the man’s psychotic fits ended, and he eventually recovered completely from both syphilis and malaria. Wagner-Jauregg repeated the experiment on nine more men with psychosis, and six of them improved.

This marked the first time that scientists had identified a physical treatment for a mental disorder — a feat that earned Wagner-Jauregg a Nobel Prize. To this day, scientists don’t know the mechanisms underlying his success.

Despite a century-long history, we rarely hear about the link between the immune system and mental illness. But the science behind it is rich and varied — from massive epidemiological studies of twins and pregnant women, to the screening of immune molecules in amniotic fluid and postmortem studies of brain inflammation.

For the non-expert, this field can be more intimidating than a box of jumbled Christmas decorations. In his new book, Infectious Behavior: Brain-Immune Connections in Autism, Schizophrenia, and Depression, biologist Paul Patterson nimbly untangles the strings of lights.

Read more at…

SFARI, January 2012.

Filed under: 2012, Art and Music, Autism, Health and Medicine, History, Reviews, SFARI

The Seven Deadly Sins: Pride

virginiahughes — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 13:33:03 +0000

On June 26, 2000, three famous men — one president, two scientists — made a big announcement at the White House. Two independent teams — one public, one private — had published a first draft of the human genome, or as one of the scientists called it, the “book of life.” It was a feat. It would change the world. It would “revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases,” the president said. Everybody was proud.

Ten years later, a journalist at a big newspaper pointed out that, well, no, the $3 billion we spent on the human genome — a dollar for each pair of DNA letters — had not bought us the ability to diagnose, prevent or treat common diseases. The genome had revolutionized basic biology, sure, but done little for human health.

The newspaper article made a lot of scientists angry. (Some of them are still sputtering about it at conferences.) It also launched a broader discussion about science communication and hype. A month ago, I went to a public event at the American Museum of Natural History, in Manhattan, called “The Human Genome and Human Health: Will the Promise Be Fulfilled?” Four experts on genetics, medicine, ethics and law discussed whether the promises of that 2000 announcement would ever come true. The general consensus was that the White House hoopla had raised expectations much too high, inevitably leading to disappointment. Pride goeth before the fall.

As a journalist, I hate hype, and I will never argue that journalists should be anything but skeptical of scientific advancements. But I recently learned that, like all of the Seven Deadly Sins, pride is necessary for survival. So I wonder, does science need hubris?

Filed under: 2011, Blogging, Business and Technology, Genetics, Health and Medicine, History, The Last Word on Nothing

2011 Houdini Awards

virginiahughes — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 01:34:13 +0000

I always thought of Harry Houdini as a master trickster, fooling his audience into believing something had happened when, in fact, it had not happened. That’s not true. Houdini’s tricks — like escaping from a locked packing crate after it had been thrown into New York’s East River — were real. His “magic” was that nobody could figure out how he pulled them off.

In the November 1925 issue of Popular Science, Houdini wrote an essay describing his obsession with the other kind of mystifiers: those who claim to have supernatural powers. Every day of his 35-year career, Houdini wrote, he had been thinking about psychics who supposedly communicate with the dead. He visited dozens of them and, as described at length in the essay, uncovered all of their lazy tricks. To give just one fun example, Houdini showed how mediums, during pitch-black seances, used trumpets controlled by their feet and mouths to produce voices that their audience believed to be ghosts.

Houdini did not consider himself a skeptic, but rather a public servant.

Filed under: 2011, Blogging, Business and Technology, History, The Last Word on Nothing