Tag Archives: gene

Mutant Super Lice May Be Coming to a School Near You

by ReganV32die Posted on August 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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With the summer closing out its final weeks, kids around the US are packing up their book-bags, collecting their colored pencils and heading back to school. But, amidst the excitement, parents have a new worry: super lice.

Lice infestations typically affect up to 12 million kids ages 3 to 11 each year. But, in 25 states, the blood-eating parasites that make their homes in hair and are commonly spread in classrooms have become resistant to most over-the-counter treatment methods, according to a new study.

Lice populations in the states in pink have developed a high level of resistance to some of the most common treatments. Kyong Yoon, Ph.D.

“We are the first group to collect lice samples from a large number of populations across the U.S.,” researcher Kyong Yoon said in a statement published with the study, which was presented at the American Chemical Society. “What we found was that 104 out of the 109 lice populations we tested had high levels of gene mutations, which have been linked to resistance to pyrethroids.”

Pyrethroids, insecticides that can be bought in FDA-approved shampoo-form from a pharmacy, have long been go-to treatments for lice infestations.

Overuse, Yoon found, could be to blame for the loss in the insecticides’ effectiveness — and the problem has been growing for years. While the latest study used the largest survey of the data on lice in the United States, the super lice problem was identified back in the 1990’s.

Still, Yoon’s study—and the alarm that resulted from it—has been scrutinized by other scientists who say it’s not time to panic yet. While Yoon concluded many of the lice had genetic mutations that made them less sensitive to the insecticides, traditional treatment methods may still be enough to kill them. As Medpage Today reports:

“The relationship between clinical and genetic resistance is still debated,” said Rémy Durand, PharmD, PhD, HDR, a researcher in the Department of Parasitology and Mycology at Hôpital Avicenne in Paris, France. While kdr mutations are well known for their effects on insecticide resistance in many insect species, Durand pointed out that some limited studies have actually reported that the presence of these “mutant alleles” in lice did not correlate with clinical failure.

Should we fear the rise of mutant lice? The good news, health officials report, is that the critters aren’t dangerous and they don’t spread disease. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still recommends the over-the-counter treatments, followed by prescription-strength remedies if that doesn’t knock them out.

Still, Yoon’s findings serve as an important warning that extends beyond louse-removal:

“If you use a chemical over and over, these little creatures will eventually develop resistance,” Yoon says. “So we have to think before we use a treatment.”

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Mutant Super Lice May Be Coming to a School Near You

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Scientists Just Came Up With the Craziest Way to Protect Your Kale

by ManuelK44fz Posted on August 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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A version of this story was originally published on Gastropod.

Farmers searching for an eco-friendly way to combat pests in their fields might someday have a surprising new weapon: speakers. It may seem crazy, but scientists hope that sound systems bumping just the right noises can prime plants to pump up the levels of their own, innate chemical protection.

That’s just one of the ways that researchers are eavesdropping on the sounds of the farm in order to improve agriculture, as we report on this episode of Gastropod, a podcast about the science and history of food. From James Bond-inspired spy devices that can capture the wing-beats of hungry insects, to microphone-equipped drones patrolling henhouses in search of sick chickens, we discover that sound has the potential to help reduce pesticide use, make our vegetables even more nutritious, and even improve animal welfare.

Mozart for Plants
The idea that plants can hear and respond to music has a long and checkered history. Charles Darwin made his son, Francis, play the bassoon in front of an herb while he watched to see whether its leaves twitched (the plant was unmoved); Barbra Streisand caused a veritable explosion of color when singing to her tulips in the musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever; and, as recently as the 1970s, UNC Greensboro physicist Dr. Gaylord Hageseth claimed that his experimental “pink” noise could make turnips sprout much faster.

While the claims that playing Mozart in a cornfield will lead to a dramatic increase in yield have proved impossible to replicate, scientists are sure that plants do respond to sounds in their environment, with small changes in gene expression, for example, or slightly different germination rates. But, as Heidi Appel, senior research scientist at the University of Missouri, told Gastropod, “We never understood why plants would have that ability.”

Pest Sounds
Intrigued, Appel teamed up with her colleague Reginald Cocroft, a behavioral ecologist, to focus on a sound that, they thought, might be particularly useful to plants: the vibrations caused by insect feeding. “These are one of the earliest and most quickly transmitted signals plants have that they’re being attacked,” said Appel. And while plants can’t hear insects the same way we do—they don’t have ears, after all—they can sense vibrations, much like club-goers feel the thump of bass or worshippers hear an organ reverberate through a church. “In that case, your body is a substrate,” picking up the sound vibrations, Appel explained. “That’s much more like what plants experience.”

To test their theory, Appel and Cocroft used lasers to measure the minute leaf tremors, about 1/10,000th of an inch, that caterpillars make when they munch on Arabidopsis (rockcress), a spindly relative of cabbage and broccoli that is commonly used in plant research. Next, they played those sounds back to one set of plants, and left the control group in peace. Finally, they let the caterpillars loose on both plant populations. Astonishingly, they found that the plants that had undergone audio training actually responded to the attack by producing much higher levels of mustard oil, their innate pesticide—which made them much less appetizing to the hungry caterpillars.

“That was very exciting and we were very happy,” Appel said. “But, at one level, we thought, ‘So what?’ Plants might respond to everything.” So they tested the plants again, this time using recordings of wind and treehoppers, a bug that looks like a thorn and sings with a high-pitched whine but does not like to dine on Arabidopsis. In response to these vibrations, however, the plants produced no increase in mustard oil. With this elegant experiment, Appel and Cocroft had solved a basic question of plant evolutionary biology: Plants evolved the ability to respond to sound vibrations in order to recognize and ward off attackers.

Musical Mustard
In doing so, Appel and Cocroft may have also hit upon a potent environmentally-friendly pesticide. Perhaps a field full of speakers blasting the sounds of crunching caterpillars might help terrified crops prime themselves to ward off a real attack, removing the need to apply chemical pesticides. This summer, Appel and Cocroft are testing commercially useful Arabidopsis relatives in the brassica family, such as kale and Brussels sprouts, to see if they demonstrate the same response.

But, as Appel pointed out to Gastropod, the use of sound might have an even more direct impact on our health. While plants evolved these chemical responses to deter pests, for humans, they often provide both flavor and health benefits. In fact, the sulfurous compounds produced by Arabidopsis and its fellow brassicas form the basis of America’s favorite hot dog condiment, mustard. And those same chemicals are actively being studied by cancer researchers for their potent health benefits. Maybe, by playing predator sounds in the field, farmers could actually grow more healthful plants.

Appel is testing this hypothesis with an African plant that is currently harvested for medicinal use, to determine whether caterpillar feeding increases the plants’ production of beneficial chemicals. If so, she can then test whether playing predator sounds has the same effect. “When we look at a plant as a source of flavor or medicine, what we are looking at is the product of millions of years of evolution of the plant interacting with its own pests—and those are largely insects,” said Appel. Insects that, it turns out, plants can hear.

This is the first of a two-part series exploring the relationship between sound and food. Listen to this episode of Gastropod for much more on the experimental history and emerging science of acoustic agriculture, from the perfect bovine playlist to the lost rhythms of Southern farming. And, if you like what you hear, subscribe to make sure you don’t miss out on hearing the difference between hot and cold tea, learning how the sound of tiny bubbles in soda changes its taste, and discovering the science behind pairing wine with music.

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Scientists Just Came Up With the Craziest Way to Protect Your Kale

Posted in Anchor, eco-friendly, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Sprout, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged colleague, eco-friendly, gene, mustard, radius, science, sound, top stories | Comments Off

Holy Shit! Almonds Require a Ton of Bees

by DonnaWahl Posted on May 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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Growing 80 percent of the globe’s almonds in California doesn’t just require massive amounts of water. It also takes a whole bunch of honeybees for pollination—roughly two hives’ worth for every acre of almonds trees, around 1.7 million hives altogether. That’s at least 80 percent of all available commercial hives in the United States, Gene Brandi, a California beekeeper who serves as vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation, recently told NPR.

Now, that vast army of bees—made up, all told, of more than 80 billion flying, buzzing soldiers—doesn’t stay put in California’s almond-happy Central Valley all year. The almond bloom typically lasts for just a few weeks (or less) in February. The modern honeybee operation is an itinerant business—beekeepers move hives throughout the year, in pursuit of paid pollination gigs—from tangerines in Florida to cherries in Washington state—as well as good forage for honey.

But California’s almond bloom is the biggest gig of all—the “largest managed pollination event anywhere in the world,” Scientific American reports. And as US honeybee populations’ health has flagged in recent years—most famously epitomized by the mysterious winter die-offs that began around a decade ago, known as colony collapse disorder—the almond industry has been drawing in a larger and and larger portion of the nation’s available bee hives.

One question that arises is: Why do the nation’s beekeepers uproot themselves and their winged charges to travel to California each year? The state houses about 500,000 beehives, meaning that more then 1 million come in, from as far away as Maine. What’s the incentive?

These days, US beekeepers typically make more money from renting out their bees for pollination than they do from producing honey. “Without pollination income, we’d be out of business,” Brandi told me. Income from the two sources varies year to year, but pollination income has grown over the years even as honey revenues have fallen, depressed by competition from imported honey. In 2012, for example, US beekeepers brought in $283 million from honey, versus an estimated $656 million from pollination.

And California’s almond growers have to shell out big money to draw in their pollinators—between $165 and $200 per hive, vs $45 to $75 a hive a decade ago, according to the Fresno Bee. That’s around $309 million, if we assume as average price of $182 per hive, the midpoint of the Bee‘s range.

What’s the impact on overall honeybee health, which has been under heavy pressure over the past decade? There are two potential downsides.

The first is from pesticides—insect growth regulators and fungicides—bees encounter in their travels around almond groves. During the 2014 California almond bloom, between 15 percent and 25 percent of beehives suffered “severe” damage, ranging from complete hive collapse to dead and deformed brood (the next generation of bees incubating in the hive), the Pollinator Stewardship Council estimated. The die-off caused an uproar, and many beekeepers pointed a finger at pesticides—and they probably had a point, as I showed here.

This year, Brandi told me, some beekeepers reported losses, but they weren’t nearly as severe or widespread as the ones in 2014. In the wake of the 2014 troubles, the Almond Board of California released a set of “best management practices” for protecting honeybees during the bloom that, Brandi said, may have influenced growers to avoid particularly harmful pesticide applications. Given that almond growers utterly rely on—and indeed, pay heavily for—honeybees for pollinating their crop, it seems logical that they’ll avoid poisoning them when possible. There will also be tension, though, as long as almond trees are planted in geographically concentrated and vast groves. Large monocrops provide an ideal habitat for pests like fungi and insects, and thus a strong incentive to respond with chemicals. There’s also the possibility that concentrating such a huge portion of the nation’s bees in such a tight geographical area facilitates the spread of viruses and other pathogens.

The second threat to bee health from pollinating California’s massive almond bloom comes from long-distance travel. This one lies at the heart of the beekeeping industry’s itinerant business model. Does it compromise bee health to pack hundreds of hives onto a flatbed truck for cross-country trips? The stresses go well beyond the occasional truck wreck. Scientific American explains the rigors of apiary highway travel like this:

The migration…continually boomerangs honeybees between times of plenty and borderline starvation. Once a particular bloom is over, the bees have nothing to eat, because there is only that one pollen-depleted crop as far as the eye can see. When on the road, bees cannot forage or defecate. And the sugar syrup and pollen patties beekeepers offer as compensation are not nearly as nutritious as pollen and nectar from wild plants. Scientists have a good understanding of the macronutrients in pollen such as protein, fat and carbohydrate, but know very little about its many micronutrients such as vitamins, metals and minerals—so replicating pollen is difficult.

A 2012 paper, coauthored by USDA bee researcher Jeff Pettis, found that long-distance travel may indeed have ill health effects—the researchers found that “bees experiencing transportation have trouble fully developing their food glands and this might affect their ability to nurse the next generation of workers.”

Brandi, for his part, dismisses travel as a factor in the overall decline in bee health. “Bees have been traveling back and forth across he country for years,” he said—since long before the colony collapse disorder and other health troubles began to emerge a decade ago, he said. He said bee travel has actually gotten less stressful over the years as beekeepers have upgraded to smoother-riding flatbed trucks. He said other factors, including pesticides, declining biodiversity, and mites (a bee pest) are likely more important drivers of declining bee health.

Meanwhile, California almond country’s massive appetite for pollination isn’t likely to dissipate anytime soon. According to the latest USDA numbers, acreage devoted to almonds expanded by 5 percent in 2014, and growers continue laying in yet more groves this year, Western Farm Press reports. Land devoted to almonds has grown 50 percent since 2005—and every time farmers add another acre of trees, they need access to two additional bee hives for pollination.

So why don’t more beekeepers simply move to California and stay put, to take advantage of the world’s biggest—and growing—pollination gig? I put that question to longtime bee expert Eric Mussen of the University of California-Davis. He said the state is already home to 500,000 of the nation’s 2.7 million hives. The almond bloom is great for a few weeks, but in terms of year-round foraging, “California is already at or near its carrying capacity for honeybees,” he said—the areas with the best-quality forage are already well stocked with bees.So satisfying the world’s ever-growing appetite for almonds will continue to require an annual armada of beehive-laden trucks.

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Holy Shit! Almonds Require a Ton of Bees

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Hillary’s Alien Baby And 7 Other Out-of-This-World Tabloid Tales

by DarbyMackie Posted on April 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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UFO enthusiasts are hoping that a Hillary Clinton presidency would blow the lid off the government’s alien conspiracies. But the shocking truth about Hillary’s affinity for aliens is already out there—in the pages of the Weekly World News, the spoof tabloid best known for its tireless coverage of Bat Boy. Throughout the ’90s and early ’00s, the WWN documented—alright, fabricated—the Clintons’ political alliances and personal dalliances with extraterrestrials, including Hillary’s on-again, off-again boyfriend P’Lod.

Some highlights of the WWN‘s Clinton-alien exclusives:

Take me to your leader: In 1992, an unnamed alien passed over President George Bush and Ross Perot to endorse presidential candidate Bill Clinton, kicking off the Clintons’ tumultuous relationship with interplanetary visitors.