The study was published earlier this month in Nature Methods.
Many thanks to Andrea Facheris of Soundtrack4u for granting permission to use the music in the video. The song is called “Symphony 5″ (a reworking of Beethoven’s), by the Robot Symphony Orchestra.
I’d like to be a mother—someday. Now is not a good time. I’m 28 years old, unmarried, and trying to build a freelance writing business from a small New York apartment.
I grew up in the wake of the feminist movement, and boy am I glad about that. Gender inequalities still exist, of course (ahem). But since grade school, my parents, teachers and favorite after-school-TV-show characters have encouraged me to invest in my education and career, just like any ambitious man. And I have.
Alas, biology still holds a trump card: my closing fertility window. By the time I’m 38, my bank account may be pregnant, but my eggs will be fossils. In last week’s issue of New Scientist, I wrote about a far-out experimental solution: freezing pieces of my ovary. The premise of the story was that if this technology ever gets off the ground, it could fulfill the original promise of the birth control pill, allowing women to make career decisions without the pressure of a ticking clock.
And it’s such a satisfying premise, isn’t it, especially for science-loving feminists like me. But after five months of airing it, triumphantly, to everyone I know, and thinking about their responses, my enthusiasm has waned. The cultural limits on the age of motherhood, I’m afraid, are far stronger than the biological ones.
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This past weekend I spent too many hours on Netflix watching Lie to Me, the Fox television drama that ran from 2009 to 2011. It’s a crime procedural (my favorite genre) about Dr. Cal Lightman, a psychologist who can spot liars by analyzing their body language and super-fast facial ticks, called microexpressions.
On the show, Lightman’s obsession with faces stems from a decades-old film of his mother recorded by her therapist. She had been institutionalized for depression, but on the film, she tells the therapist how good she feels after treatment, and how she longs to see her children. The therapist is convinced, allows her to go home, and she promptly commits suicide. After years of analyzing the footage, Lightman discovers that his mother’s face had shown flashes of agony while she lied about her happiness. He goes on to create a system for coding subtle facial expressions and launches a consulting firm, The Lightman Group, that helps police (and all sorts of other clients) detect when individuals are lying, and why.
It’s one of those shows that sticks with you, or with me, anyway. For the past few days I’ve been surreptitiously scrutinizing the faces of everyone I see—people exchanging small talk at a birthday party, people telling outrageous true stories on stage, my longtime friends, even my fiancé. Could I discover their hidden feelings just by paying closer attention? It’s tricky, of course, when you don’t know if someone is lying. But what about when you do know, like in the sad case of Mike Daisey?
Yesterday I hatched a plan: Learn the basics of the real science behind Lie and Me, then watch a bunch of old Daisey clips on YouTube and root out the signs of his deception.
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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.
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This worm is born to travel. It begins life in human lymph, only to seep out of the lymphatic vessels into the grimy fluid that bathes our organs. From there, it drifts into the blood stream. During the day, it keeps to deep veins. Once darkness falls, it migrates up to the skinny veins just under the skin.
Then one lucky night, a mosquito will find the sleeping human and feast on its blood. The worm will end up in the insect’s gut and, eventually, in its muscles. It will reach adolescence there, and then travel to the mosquito’s head, stinger and, finally, to the next person the insect bites. From the blood stream, the worm will find its way back to the lymph to mate and, after such a long journey, retire. It will stay there for six to eight years, the rest of its life, and pump out millions of new little worms to embark on the same cross-species adventure.
Unfortunately, the health of these worms, called parasitic filarial nematodes, is in direct conflict with that of their human hosts. The worms slowly accumulate inside of people, eventually clogging lymph nodes and causing the extreme swelling, discoloration and deformity known as elephantiasis. More than 120 million people in 72 countries are infected with the disease, formally called lymphatic filariasis, leaving some 40 million incapacitated.
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The new study, certainly not the last word on DNA, was published last week in The EMBO Journal. The music is Chopin’s Minute Waltz, the subject of another post.
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Some 40 years ago, researchers at the University of Missouri were searching for an alternative to the condom — a cheap, trustworthy and reversible form of male birth control.
For their first study, published in 1975, they strapped anesthetized rats, face-down, to a plexiglass platform with a cut-out cup full of water for their dangling scrota. The scientists then exposed the animals’ testicles to a variety of things.
Heat, for example, can kill sperm (which is thought to explain why the testes hang outside of the body). So some of the animals got a 140-degree Fahrenheit water bath for 15 minutes. Others received a dose of infrared radiation, or short blasts of microwaves or ultrasound. After treatment, the animals had constant access to females until they impregnated them.
Rats given the hot water bath didn’t conceive for 35 days. Infrared radiation doubled that sterile window, to 75 days. Sometimes microwave treatment worked, sometimes it didn’t. The best protocol, by far, was ultrasound, which the researchers transmitted through the water cup. One 5-minute exposure to these high-frequency sound waves led to seven months of sterility. Histology studies of the tissue confirmed that the animals showed a big loss of developing sperm at two months post-ultrasound, but were back to normal by 10 months.
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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.
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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?
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