Is there hope for young scientists in Canada?

It’s been a long time since I updated this blog that I once truly cherished. I intend to get back to sharing my thoughts on the latest and greatest in science, but the last year I have found myself pulled in many other directions.

One of these directions is toward science advocacy, and science policy. I was given the opportunity last year to be a founding member of the Vancouver branch of Future of Research. Future of Research were founded in 2014 by a group of young scientists in Boston (USA), who were alarmed by what they saw as a critically unsustainable research environment. Funding system only reward already successful researchers; there is a complete lack of launching grants to help new professors reach this position; and once young scientists fail to secure grants and are pushed out of universities, no organised career training to help them find alternative career paths where they can put their signifiant (taxpayer subsidised) educations to good use.

We risk losing a generation of our best and brightest, and our best hopes of tackling the 21st century’s significant problems along with it.

The following is an excerpt from an upcoming research paper which we at Future of Research Vancouver have submitted for publication in the journal  F1000research. Once published, we hope to launch an advocacy campaign to help show university and government bodies that what we are proposing is not only essential for the future of Canada’s research environment, but could usher in a new age of innovation.

Canada stand ready to be leaders in 21st century science, if only we have the determination to say so.

 

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Shaping the Future of Research: a perspective from Early Career Researchers in Vancouver, Canada

The Future of Research Vancouver Symposium (FoRV2017) was held on February 20^th, 2017, following increasing concern by members of the local academic community that the voices of junior researchers were not being considered in discussions around the future of funding and training structures in Canadian research.

In laboratories and offices across Canada today, the majority of research is undertaken by early career researchers (ECRs), namely graduate students and postdoctoral fellows (PDFs). ECRs design and execute experiments, collect data, write papers, and are often solely responsible for supervising more junior team members. As such, ECRs play a core role in Canada’s science, technology and health sectors.

 

However, the Canadian research landscape now presents significant challenges to ECRS:

• Numbers of PhDs awarded annually by Canadian universities are growing, and the increasing length of PDFs’ tenures. However, the number of junior faculty positions available at Canadian universities has shrunk.
• Canadian ECRs are told to seek alternative career paths, but report high levels of dissatisfaction with the career development and professional training available to them.
• A lack of “staff scientist” or stable mid-career options make academic employment undesirable, and result in lab management problems including institutional knowledge loss, and a dearth of supervision and support.
• Wages for Canadian ECRs are not internationally competitive, which is exacerbated in BC by Vancouver’s high cost of living, and many ECRs do not receive basic employment benefits available to other working residents.
• ECRs report high levels of symptoms of mental illness.

 

Recent announcements regarding increases to the Canadian research councils’ budgets offer promises that “rising tides will raise all ships”, but few details have been offered on actual plans to improve opportunities for ECRs.

In order to effect change, junior researchers must identify the multifaceted challenges they face, and confront the role that academia, government, and industry play in them.  As such, the opening session of FoRV2017 consisted of talks and panel discussions from local members of the scientific community, including industry and academic leaders, who have been vocal regarding ECR issues and the sustainability of Canadian science. This was followed by workshops aimed at discussing the issues that had been raised, and prompt potential solutions from attendees. Workshops focussed on 4 core topics: how trainees could be better prepared for careers in science; how sustainable, secure career pathways could be created for ECRs; how funding of research in Canada could be structured to balance basic research, knowledge translation, and training of ECRs; and how scientists and institutions could be better incentivised for behaviours that support the future of Canadian science.

 

Based on the responses from attendees, and further literature review and discussion among organisers, we endorse the following recommendations:

1. Improve ECR-targeted funding, including grants which provide operating costs for ECRs transitioning from a PDF to junior faculty position, and recognising ECRs contributions to grants awarded to their supervising professors.
2. Develop guidelines for mentorship and training, such as professional development programs, and tools to help supervising professors provide high-quality mentorship, including incentivising them to allow ECRs to seek training outside the professor-ECR relationship.
3. Bridge gaps between academia and alternative career paths, such as through partnered research with private industry, and internships with non-academic groups.

 

If the future of Canadian research lies in its junior researchers, then strategies must be laid out for how universities, government, and the knowledge-intensive industries can better nurture our ECRs. Recent grassroots campaigns, such as #SupportTheReport to encourage the Canadian government to take up the recommendations of the Fundamental Science Review, have shown that effective change is possible. Canadian ECRs must be ready to stake their claims in their future, and we hope that meetings such as FoRV2017 are only the beginning.

 

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Until next time

 

– J

Cited Podcast bring academia into the light

In two small offices of the Michael Smith Laboratories, among the controlled chaos of labs and data, a small team of industrious journalists record a radio show and podcast called Cited. Last month, their hard work was rewarded with one of British Columbia’s most prestigious awards for journalism: The Jack Webster Award in Feature and Enterprise Reporting, for their episode The Heroin Clinic.

 

Cited originally rose out of The UBC Terry Project. Founded by Dr. Dave Ng, science educator and director of the Advanced Molecular Biology Laboratory at the MSL, and Dr. Allen Sens, a professor in UBC’s Political Science department, The Terry Project brought together both science and humanities training to help UBC students tackle global challenges with diverse tools and techniques.

 

Cited’s executive producers and co-hosts Sam Fenn and Gordon Katic took this idea of diverse people solving problems together, and ran with it. At its core, Cited is about discoveries. It investigates how academics are compelled to leave their ivory towers and interact directly with communities, governments, and media, in order to turn knowledge into action. Sam and Gordon’s stories combine scholarship across huge areas of expertise, with original investigative journalism. Regularly playing on CBC radio shows like The Doc Project, Cited had already won 3 national awards for campus and community radio before their latest recognition.

Scientists are in the knowledge-production business. They go into the lab or into the field, perform their experiments, then publish their findings in highly specialised journals. However, if there is one consistent lesson to be learned from listening to Cited, it is that changing the world is not as easy as having new data with a great p-value. “We could chart the Titanic sinking while we drown” Sam says “but it wouldn’t do much good!”

 

The Heroin Clinic captures this tension through the lens of the epidemic of heroin addiction gripping Vancouver’s downtown eastside. In 2005, a controversial solution to this public health crisis was proposed: heroin users could be treated by giving access to free, safe heroin. As bold as this seemed, a trial was initiated, and addicts from the local area were recruited. 3 years later the results showed that this approach had real promise. However, the researchers overseeing the trial only collected their data and presented it to provincial and federal governments, and did not go beyond that to advocate for its importance. Predictably, governments baulked at the challenge of selling voters on a policy of giving drug addicts more drugs, and when the staid researchers refused to push back, the program fell apart. The story that follows in The Heroin Clinic is one of relapses and deaths, downtown eastside communities educating themselves on international human rights conventions, and academics learning to raise their voices. “It should be obvious to scholars that simply doing good work, and disseminating it, is not the answer to effecting change in the way people think and what governments fund,” says Gordon. Sam agrees “the moral of the story is that smart people are limited in what they can do alone”. But joining together with communities and interest groups can transform scientists’ data into real-world relevance.

 

Fortunately, Sam and Gordon credit Canadians with being open to academics’ opinions. People are increasingly looking for real solutions to old problems. “Actually, these days scientists are some of the most front-facing public intellectuals,” says Gordon. Sam continues “but be concerned about meaningless praise of science by governments which doesn’t follow through”. Scientists’ voices need to be a part of the conversation in any democracy. This is why Sam and Gordon see investigative media like Cited as so important, because they provide a way for academics to use narratives that include and inform people, so that their hard earned p-values can make an impact on the world.

 

 

Online Reference: Cited
http://citedpodcast.com/

Online Reference: Award acceptance speech http://www.jackwebster.com/dinner/video.php?id=859

Online Reference:  The Heroin Clinic podcast
http://citedpodcast.com/41-the-heroin-clinic/

 

This article is was also published on the Michael Smith Laboratories website: http://www.msl.ubc.ca/news/cited-podcast-wins-top-journalism-award

The True Cost of an Ultimate Sacrifice (part 1)

This past Friday went by a lot of names: Armistice Day, in much of Europe; Veterans Day, in the US. Back home in Australia, and here in Canada, it was Remembrance Day. In every case, it marked 98 years since Europe descended into the madness of the Great War. It took much of the world and some 20 million lives with it.

Commemorating war is one of those essential things that a nation builds its cultural identity around. But most of us were privileged enough to born in a time and place where violent conflict is an abstract thing that happens to other people. So to try and make the tragedy of war hit home, we usually try and talk about it in terms of small-scale events. We talk about the sacrifice of the individuals who left, served, and died; kids who bravely made The Ultimate Sacrifice. We make war personal.

But this narrative of The Ultimate Sacrifice doesn’t work for me. By focussing on stories of the tragic heroes of our past, it assumes any one person would have made a difference in war, ignoring that almost all individuals died almost completely in vain. In this way, it is a myth that tries to make death meaningful after-the-fact.

In addition, celebrating our nations’ sacrificial lambs distracts us from the real cost of war: what we sacrificed. What we as a species strugglingtoday with enormous challenges requiring incredible solutions, gave up by sending a generation to hell in 1914; and what we lose every time we repeat that mistake.

We are told these people died for us. However, I think that their deaths held us back. And we’re still paying the price.

 

 

The early 20^th century was a time of brilliant innovation and scientific revolutions. The periodic table of elements had finally been completed, giving chemistry a launching-off point for bold new discoveries; quantum physics was revealing that solid matter and light were actually one-and-the-same; and we were about to realise that the re-discovery of the work of an obscure Austrian monk had just revealed the fundamental code of all life  –  the gene.

Scientific progress thrives in environments like this, where ideas and technologies continuously bounce and build off each other, and one discovery begets the next at an ever-increasing rate. But this perpetual-motion machine of innovation is also extremely fragile to the slightest malfunction. And when war broke out on July 27^th, 1914, those who were to be the young innovators and leaders of a new century were now called on to serve and fight. It was like a record scratch across the culture.

This didn’t just put the pace of scientific discovery on hold for a few years. Braking the machine of innovation while it was still accelerating meant that the consequences would ripple out for decades to come. This is what I feel when I think of history’s great wars: what could have been if we didn’t periodically lose our minds and turn entire countries against each other? What would the world look like today if we hadn’t burned the books of some of the 20^th century’s brightest minds?

Tomorrow, I’d like to look at one of these minds. They weren’t a world-striding genius, or the inventor of a brilliant new technology. They were just a very good scientist, like so many others. But it’s precisely their slightly-above-averageness which makes their story so interesting, and tragic, to me.

Until then.

 

|- J

– J

The long haul

 

I think one of the hardest things about working in science is that it is supposed to be all-encompassing. I’ve written about this briefly before, but when you’re a scientist, you are a scientist.

I’ve been working full-time as a postdoc at the University of British Columbia for almost 5 months now, and I could not be happier. The team I am working with are amazing, I’m finding the field more interesting than I even anticipated, and I have complete control over my projects.

Scaling up from the PhD is difficult. I’m trying to push myself to think about the big questions I want to answer, and design 5 year projects that can make a tiny dent in the problem. So I’m consistently finding myself daunted. It feels sometimes like I need to do everything at once!

Which I can’t, even if I wanted to. And I don’t want to. Life outside the lab is good. I’m engaged, now, and we sit on the couch and laugh, and take our dog for a walk. Today we caught the last bit of snow on the Vancouver mountains, and it was glorious.

So it’s a vicious cycle. I feel like I should be doing everything, but I don’t want to do everything, because I need to nurture my life outside the lab, which makes me feel like I’m not doing enough, which… well, you get the idea.

I need to remember that the best that anyone can do is make a plan, and follow it through one step at a time. Nothing was ever gained by worrying about the problems that are 10 steps down the line from what I’m working on at this moment. I need to keep checking up on the future, making sure it’s still there, but if I’m not waist-deep in the present then it’ll steam-roll me when it finally arrives.

Anyway, enough introspection. I’m back to regular programming next week.

Love,

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– J

Sucker-punch antibiotics, DINOSAURS, and new hope for Canadian science – Sciencish News for 9/11/2015 (part 2)

The show keeps on going! For Part 2 of Sciencish News we’ve got a brilliant way to track bacteria to their hiding places, some spectacular dinosaur finds, and high, high hopes for the future of Canadian science. Read on, won’t you? (though if you missed it, here’s Part 1 of the news)

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Get ‘em where the sun don’t shine

The bacteria Staphylococcus aureus, or “golden staph” as it’s sometimes known, causes thousands of deaths every year. Outbreaks in hospitals are a problem, and resistance to most antibiotics means that small-scale infections can quickly get out of hand. Combine this with the ability to switch to a “persistent” lifestyle, wherein bacteria go covert and hide out in human cells without raising the suspicion of the immune system, and it’s no wonder that researchers are scrambling to find new ways to combat staph.

Researchers from the biotechnology company Genentech, out of San Francisco, USA, have unveiled a promising new weapon in this fight. They noted that antibiotics were often ineffective at killing staph that had invaded human host cells, where the bacteria replicate. Staph can then re-emerge after antibiotic treatment to cause a new round of infection. Genentech scientists therefore set about designing a drug that could access these reserve forces. They settled on an inactive “prodrug” derived from the antibiotic rifampicin, conjugated to an antibody. Antibodies are protein molecules naturally produced by the immune system, and work by binding tight to the surface of invading bacteria or viruses. They are also extremely specific for their target of choice, and the Genentech researchers found their antibody-antibiotic conjugate bound tightly to the surface of staph cells. In fact, it bound so tight that when a bacteria invaded a human host cell it brought any antibody-antibiotic conjugates with it. Once inside a host cell, human digestive enzymes break the bond connecting the antibody and antibiotic. This activated the antibiotic, and now the staph found themselves trapped inside a host cell along with an extremely deadly drug! Even more impressive, when staph accidentally brought the antibody-antibiotic conjugate with it into a cell that already contained “persistent” bacteria that had been hiding out, it also killed these bacteria. The antibody-antibiotic conjugate appeared much more effective than existing frontline antibiotics. Part of this effectiveness may be because, having been specifically targeted to the staph by the antibody and then brought into the enclosed space of a host cell, the antibiotic becomes extremely concentrated, as opposed to other non-targeted antibiotics that disseminate throughout the entire body. This work opens up exciting new possibilities for employing similar strategies with other pathogens.

Find the paper here

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Warming feathers and giant raptors

It’s hard to believe that, when I was a kid, it was considered controversial to say that dinosaurs had feathers. Nowadays, we’ve come to accept that at least the majority of therapods – two-legged dinosaurs – were downright fabulous, and probably bore all sorts of plumage. But the purpose of feathers for these “non-avian” dinosaurs remains controversial. Now, a description of a spectacularly preserved Ornithomimus by researchers from the University of Alberta, Canada, has shed some light on the mystery. Ornithomimus (meaning “bird-mimic”) stood a little taller than an adult human, and would likely have eaten a wide variety of plants and animals (see image below). This new specimen, a 75-million year old animal that is so well preserved that even skin from the leg to the body are retained, has shown that Ornithomimus’ body and tail were covered with feathers. Like a modern ostrich, however, its legs were bare. This suggests that, like ostriches, Ornithomimus‘ body was covered with feathers to keep it warm, while bare legs allowed it to regulate its body temperature somewhat to prevent overheating. The strikingly avian-like morphology of this Ornithomimus makes the relationship between birds and dinosaurs just that bit clearer. I bet the tubby kid that Sam Neill traumatised at the start of Jurassic Park feels extra stupid now.
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Credit: Julius Cstonoyi

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In other slightly mind-boggling dinosaur news, palaeontologists at the University of Kansas, USA, have described a new species of raptor that outshines almost all others. Named Dakotaraptor after the state it was found in, it is thought to have been around 5.5 metres long, and would have towered over an adult human. Like the famous dog-sized Velociraptor, Dakotaraptor would have been quick and deadly, built for agility. It is not the biggest raptor found to date – that honour stays with the 7 meter monster Utahraptor – but what is most striking is the famous sickle-shaped claw on each of its rear legs, characteristic of the raptors. It was an incredible 24 centimeters long, beating out even the beefier Utaraptor’s impressive 22 centimeters. The forearms of Dakotaraptor also show evidence of quill knobs, indicating it too was well-feathered.
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Credit: Emily Willoughby

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Find the papers here and here

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New life for Canadian science

Canadian scientists were celebrating two weeks ago when the 10-year reign of Prime Minister Stephen Harper was brought to an end. The Harper administration had been repeatedly accused of ignoring scientific advice on environmental issues and climate change; of defunding chief government grants bodies; of devaluing “basic” research that did not have direct industry outcomes; and silencing government-funded scientists from speaking about their work without explicit permission. There was hope that much of that would change with the new Prime Minister and his Liberal government taking office last Tuesday.

Now, early signs indicate that there is reason to have hope. Canada finds itself with a new minister, a Minister of Science. Kirsty Duncan will be the first person to take the reigns – a medical geographer who searched for frozen samples of Spanish flu in the permafrost of Norway, and earned herself a reputation as a genuine badarse. Her ministry will oversee mainly research-driven science, which doesn’t necessarily aim to have short-term outcomes for the general population. Meanwhile, the new Minister of Innovation, Science, and Economic Development is Navdeep Bains. A former financial analyst, his ministry will concern itself more with applied research with industrial outcomes when it comes to science. I should hope that having two ministers will allow the tensions between “applied” and “basic” science to be dispelled in this country. However, it’s hard to see how much can be achieved without increasing funding of grants agencies: last year, only ~12% of grant applications submitted to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research were successful.

An added bonus is that Canada’s Minister of Environment now has “and Climate Change” added to their title, giving hope that the latter issue will now have significantly more focus than the frequently denialist Harper government gave it. Catherin McKenna, a former lawyer who specialised in trade and international law, is filling the role, and has had to hit the ground running with climate talks in Paris beginning this week.

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That’s it! Hope you’re keeping well out there. Hey, I’m sorry, I’ve just been talking and talking, and I haven’t let you say anything. If you have any suggestions or questions please leave a Comment, or feel free to email me at thesciencishblog@gmail.com. Also, go ahead an follow me on Twitter @Sciencish.

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Bye for now.

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– J

Windswept Mars, antioxidant-loving cancers, and electric bacteria – Sciencish News for 9/11/2015 (part 1)

Well, it’s been a big week out there in the world of science, and I’m behind! So, we’re going with two posts today. First up, we’ve got big news from the Red Planet, stressed out cancers kept in the balance, and (more) electric bacteria.

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Mars blown dry, but glowing

NASA held a press conference on Friday, the lead up to which was full of speculation. Was life finally found? What about Matt Damon? The news when it was finally announced was a little less spectacular, but had plenty of highlights to get excited about.

It has long been thought that the arid, frigid, planet was once warm and wet back in its ancient history, with flowing streams. For liquid water to flow on Mars would seem to require a much thicker atmosphere with plenty of carbon dioxide. So, where did Mars’ atmosphere, and its water, go? New data from NASA’s orbital Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft suggests that solar winds are responsible. Solar winds are streams of particles, mainly protons and electrons, which pour out of the Sun’s atmosphere at an incredible rate of 400 km/s. When the wind encounters Mars’ atmosphere it generates an electrical field. This whips electrically charged gas molecules into a frenzy, accelerating them so fast they are ripped out of the atmosphere and shot into space (see video below). Solar winds are normally deflected by a planet’s magnetic field, but Mars’ magnetic field is extremely weak, and concentrated only around its South pole, leaving it almost entirely exposed. Understanding this process of solar stripping (or “sputtering”, as it’s delightfully called) is important if we ever try and plan to colonise Mars and give it an “Earth-like” atmosphere. The loss of atmosphere is still going on, and recent solar storms have in fact accelerated the process.

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So Mars’ weakling magnetic field has left it utterly exposed to the elements, but there is an upside to this windy bombardment: it makes the nights spectacular. Back on Christmas Day, 2015, MAVEN saw a bright auroral glow similar to the Northern and Southern Lights here on Earth. Auroras are the result of the charged particles of the solar wind smashing into particles of the atmosphere of a planet. On Earth these particles are deflected by the magnetic field, meaning auroras only appear at the poles. But MAVEN’s newest observations show that, thanks to Mars’ weaker magnetic field, its auroras span almost the entire northern hemisphere, lighting up a massive part of the night sky in greens, reds, and blues. The solar wind particles can almost penetrate much further into the atmosphere, so that an aurora would appear much closer overhead – almost twice as close as on Earth.
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Credit: NASA/GSFC

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Volatile chemicals keep cancer under pressure

Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are highly volatile molecules that occur naturally during energy production in all cells. Their reactivity means they can inflict significant damage to cell components and even damage DNA, causing mutations that can lead to cancer. Cells therefore produce antioxidants that quench this “oxidative stress”, protecting against ROS’ harmful effects.

As early stage tumours lose control of energy production they typically have fairly high levels of ROS. These in turn causes more DNA mutations, some of which can help the tumour develop and start to grow out of control. But too much ROS activity stresses the young cancer – just as it would a healthy cell. Now, a new study has demonstrated that oxidative stress can even stop full-blown malignant tumours from reaching their final stage, unless they adapt. Once a cancer develops into a malignant tumour, individual tumour cells may invade the blood stream and spread to tissues all over the body, by a process called “metastasis” (see image below). But this is extremely inefficient, and most tumour cells that enter circulation die. However, researchers at the University of Texas, USA, found that tumour cells can increase their odds of survival by ramping-up production of antioxidants, which quench ROS. This suggests that the ability to deal with ROS and oxidative stress is a major factor limiting metastasis of tumour. Excitingly, they found that treating mice with drugs that inhibited production of antioxidants prevented the spread of tumours, opening up potentially powerful means of controlling tumours in patients by inhibiting their ability to quench oxidative stress. It also gives the lie to claims made by some health food evangelists that antioxidant dietary supplements and “super foods” can boost health and prevent disease. Indeed, this new data is in line with previous findings that antioxidant supplements can in fact boost cancer growth!
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Credit: Nature

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Find the paper here

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Bacteria spread the good word – electronically!

Following on from last week’s talk of electrical creatures, another story came up this week regarding the amazingly versatile uses that bacteria can put electricity to. Many species of bacteria grow in tight-knit communities called “biofilms”. Belonging to a biofilm can have many advantages for vulnerable single-celled organisms like bacteria, including increased resistance to antibiotics and environmental stresses like drying and heat. Biofilms can therefore cause stubborn infections, and be a serious problem in hospitals where they might coat surfaces or surgical instruments. However, bacteria are normally solitary single-celled souls, meaning that if they want to belong to a community they have to learn how to get along and communicate with their neighbours. In multicellular organisms like animals and plants, cell-cell communication is often achieved by the flow of charged atoms, called “ions”, into and out of cells via specialised ion channels. Bacteria are known to possess ion channels, but a role for them in signalling has never been demonstrated.

Bacillus subtilis lives in biofilms that go through periodic cycles or growth where the colony starts to expand very rapidly, before slowing to a halt. The reasons for this were unclear, but researchers from the University of California, USA, proposed that cycles of starvation played a role. They hypothesised that when B. subtilis biofilms grew too fast, bacteria stuck in the centre of the colony start to run out of nutrients as bacteria on the periphery eat them up, especially the essential amino acid glutamate. Glutamate starvation means interior bacteria can’t produce ammonium, another nutrient that all bacteria in the biofilm rely on, meaning that growth of bacteria at the periphery also halts. Growth then can’t re-start until interior cells can access glutamate. Investigating how bacteria in biofilms might communicate these changing nutrient requirements across the colony, researchers observed fluctuating waves of potassium ions spreading out from the centre of biofilms (see image below). These appeared to be due to central bacteria releasing potassium from their cell into the biofilm environment. Neighbouring bacteria responded to this rise in environmental potassium in turn, by triggering release of their own potassium stores. Potassium ions have a positive electrical charge, and the membrane that encases all bacterial cells maintains a tight control on the balance of positive and negative charge between the interior of the cell and the exterior (what’s known as the “electrical potential”). These waves of potassium release therefore reduce the electrical potential across the bacterial cell membrane as they move through the biofilm. Since uptake of glutamate and ammonium relies on the cell electrical potential, this would prevent bacteria at the periphery from hogging it all, allowing those at the biofilm centre to catch up. The researchers confirmed their findings by showing that experimentally starving bacteria of glutamate induced these potassium waves, while gorging on glutamate dampened them. This is a fascinating example of how single-celled organisms can act as a multicellular whole, with individuals at the biofilm periphery cooperating with this electrical signalling and even sacrificing their own growth for the good of the biofilm.
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Credit: Prindle et al. (2015) , Nature

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Find the paper here

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That’s is for part 1 of the news – but check back shortly for stealth drugs, dinosaurs, and high hopes for Canadian science…

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– J

Death bacon, tractor beams, and all electrical creatures! – Sciencish News for 29/10/2015

Hello, and welcome to the inaugural edition of the Sciencish News, where I pick out what’s caught my eye. Let’s get stuck in.
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Hamming it up

News that meat will kill us all swept across social media yesterday after the International Agency for Cancer Research (IARC) released its most recent paper that, if you were to believe the headlines, classed processed meats like bacon and sausage as being as dangerous to health as smoking and drinking. Except, of course that’s not true. The IARC report doesn’t rank potential carcinogens (cancer-causing substances) as being better or worse for health, but instead simply ranks them according to how confident scientists are that they do or do not contribute to cancer. So, smoking probably causes cancer, and kale probably doesn’t. The IARC report never states that eating processed meats is equivalent to smoking, except as far as we are now confident that they both do contribute to cancer, making them both “Group 1 carcinogens”. But their actual contributions are very different. As pointed out by Cancer Research UK, while some 86% of lung cancers are caused by smoking (amounting to 19% of all cancers), this most recent data suggests that processed meats contribute to 21% of all bowel cancers, the equivalent of only 3% of all cancers. Meanwhile, red meats have been classed only as “Group 2A” carcinogens, meaning they only “probably” contribute to cancer. It’s currently unclear what a “healthy” amount of red and processed meat is, however most government bodies recommend less than 70g per day.

Find the report here.
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Moved by sound

Researchers at Public University of Navarre, Pamplona, Spain, have developed a working “sonic tractor beam“, that can move objects through the air. Similar technologies in the past have relied on at least two speakers. These use interfering sound waves to create pockets of low pressure air, in which small objects can sit. Opposing high pressure pockets can then push or pull the object. The Pamplona team achieves the same result with just one flat stack of speakers, creating 3D patterns of sound waves on top of the speakers which they call “acoustic holograms”. These patterns are extremely flexible, acting as anything from cages to tweezers to move small polystyrene beads in three dimensions. Because human bodies can conduct sound waves, the researchers hope this technology could be used to move a drug through a patient’s body right to the site where it would be move effective, such as right up to the edge of a growing tumour. However because the system relies on sound waves, it’ll be a long time before any spaceships are being dragged to their doom with tractor beam technology – after all, sound needs an atmosphere to work.

Find the paper here.
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Supercharged eels

It seems that electric eels (or, more awesomely in Latin, Electrophorus electricus), know how to make the most of what they’ve got. When attacking prey, E. electricus emits 1 millisecond, high-voltage pulses. This causes muscle contractions similar to a TASER that temporarily immobilise the victim, after which it is swallowed whole. The eel body can be thought of as having two ends like a battery, with the head and tail being the positive and negative ends, respectively. Attacks are usually “monopolar”, with the positive head-end being the major source of the electric field. However, eels could theoretically double the strength of their attack by joining their head and tail together, completing the electric circuit. Now, a researcher at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, USA, has shown E. electricus does precisely that when dealing with larger, more troublesome prey. This induces debilitating muscle fatigue, giving the eel ample opportunity to move its victim into a better position to be devoured. A hand please for the most awesome, best-named creature around: Electrophorous electricus.

Find the paper here.
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Electric union

Finally, levels of the potent greenhouse gas methane in Earth’s atmosphere are known to significantly rely on events that take place deep under the sea. Here, microorganisms break down methane that is released from the seabed, using it as a food source in the otherwise harsh environment. This has the bonus effect of keeping global methane levels, and global warming, in check. This process relies in particular on two highly specialised microorganisms: a bacterium called deltaproteobacteria; and a bacteria-like microbe known as anaerobic methanotrophic archaea (or ANME). These distantly related microbes are often found living together in dense colonies, and appear to cooperate to break down methane. Each species performs one half of the energy-intensive chemical reaction: indeed neither can do the job on its own! However, researchers have been unable to identify how exactly they achieve this teamwork. Now, two independent papers from groups in Japan and Germany have shown that deltaproteobacteria and ANME may interact through electrical connections. Microscopic wire-like structures called “pili” were observed connecting ANME and deltaproteobacteria, and ANME appears to secrete iron-rich haem proteins into the space between it an deltaproteobacteria which may help to conduct electrons. This may allow ANME to electrons in its half of the methane oxidation reaction, which it then donates to deltaproteobacteria for use in its half of the reaction.

Find the papers here and here.

That’s it for today! Please leave any comments below, or email me at thesciencishblog@gmail.com. You can also follow me on Twitter @Sciencish.
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– J

The Sciencish Blog – Welcome!

Hello, hi, how are you? It’s so good to meet you!

So, this is the “breaking ground” post for The Sciencish Blog (barring a couple of very awkward placeholders of Justin Trudeau’s face). With this space I’m hoping for nothing more than to have an outlet for my writing, to practice putting my ideas together, to force me to read outside and beyond my field, and to have a little fun doing it!

I’ll aim to do news highlights 2-3 times a week (ideally Tuesday and Friday), and at least one original article every week (probably Sundays).

If you happen to stumble across this space, and like something you see, please let me know by leaving a comment, emailing me at thesciencishblog@gmail.com, or tweeting me @Sciencish.

Until then: love you!

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– J