Welcome back to another sizzling hot edition of the Friday Science Whatsit. It is a simply gorgeous day out here at Science Central. The sky is bluish, the sun is shining bright, the air is filled with that heavenly fresh mowed grass smell from all the folks mowing their lawns, and the kids are playing in the green spaces around this apartment building.
It is downright bucolic out there, and reminds me of pleasant summer days of my youth. I have always enjoyed the blue skies and sunshine of summer, despite a propensity for both heatstroke and hay fever.
But before this turns into A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, on with the science!
First out of the gate is this story of an intriguing new therapy to cure deafness.
It involves taking some bone from the patient’s rib and essentially molding a new eardrum for the patient. That, and an amplifier and receiver implant so small that it’s practically weightless, allows the patient to abandon more cumbersome and expensive hearing aids, and gives them a broader dynamic range than most traditional hearing aids can afford to give as well.
After all, less sophisticated means of amplification simply increase the volume of the sound, and under that model, you usually have to turn up the volume to get more dynamic range.
That’s why people with hearing aids are always fiddling with the volume control. They turn it up when they are trying to understand speech, but then everything else becomes too loud to endure so they end up turning it right back down again.
With this new innovation, specifically the replacement eardrum and the tiny audio processor attached to it, allows for something far more like the subtlety and sophistication of a normal human ear.
Three cheers for medical science!
From there we go to the realm of the animals. Brace yourself for… ZOMBIE ANTS.
There is a fungus, Ophiocordyceps unilaterali, that incorporates living carpenter ants into its life cycle in a particularly gruesome and chilling way.
When the ant is infected, it is overcome by the urge to climb down from its high forest canopy home to the lower leaves of the tree, where it clamps down hard with its powerful mandibles, and dies.
The fungus continues to grow inside the ant, dissolving the ant’s internal organs into food for itself, but avoiding the muscles that keep the ant clamped in place.
Eventually, the infected ex-ant splits open and drops spores onto the forest floor, where they can infect more ants and start the cycle again.
It is always fascinating when an apparently complex series of actions can be the result of something as simple as a fungal infection.
Intriguingly, some theorize that need to avoid this fungus is the whole reason carpenter ants build their nests high up in the tree when all their food is on the ground.
Ants have even been shown to avoid areas infected by the fungus.
It’s like there is a terrifying war going on between the ants and the fungus. Real horror-movie stuff.
Got to feel sorry for the poor ants, though.
On to a less horrifying section of the animal kingdom : humpback whales have been shown to learn new dishing techniques from one another.
Whales being elusive creatures with vast ranges, it took 27 years to get enough data to make this conclusion, but now we can add the humpback whale to the list of species which have shown signs of social learning, or what in humans we call “culture”.
In the whales’ case, what was tracked was a particular method of feeding that involved the whale first smacking its mighty tail down on the surface of the water.
It was first observed in 1980 in a single whale, and researchers were able to track it as it spread from whale to whale and even through successive generations.
That means that these whales are capable of innovation. A future researcher who was ignorant of this study might very well declare this fish-slapping technique was “instinctual” to the whales.
But it’s not. One whale invented it. Other whales tried it and liked it. They in turn taught it to their calves. Eventually, they will all know it.
The implications regarding the sophistication of the whales’ society order and mental capacities are breathtaking. It means they still try new things as adults. It means they are capable of innovating by experimentation and observation just like we do.
Suddenly, those people who wants to give whales citizenship seem a little less silly.
And if you think that is impressive, wait to you learn how vervet monkeys adapt to local monkey culture.
It is the classic “when in Rome” situation. A vervet monkey who finds himself amongst members of a different monkey troupe than his own will quickly adopt that troupe’s distinctive habits and mannerisms.
This suggests to me that these monkeys have the same instinct to conform that we humans beings have. Any world traveler will tell you that when you are in a foreign culture, you instinctively begin to search for social cues to tell you what to do and how to act in that culture.
And you don’t need to travel to the Kalahari to experience this, either. Even just hanging out with a different social group than your own will activate this instinct.
That is why people at a party always go through a careful feeling-out process at the beginning. When a bunch of socially unconnected people go to the party, they are essentially creating a new temporary culture for the duration of the party,
And when we are out of our usual social groups, we instinctively become more reserved, formal, and hesitant. We observe the others around us for social cues, just like we did as children.
So these vervet monkeys are doing a very human thing when they do “as the Romans do”. So much for yet another thing that we humans thought made us unique.
And we definitely are unique amongst all of the children of Earth.
We just haven’t put our finger on exactly why yet.
And finally tonight, we have an update on a medical miracle in the making : teaching the immune system to go after cancer.
Normally, your immune system ignores cancer because, mutated as they are, cancer cells are still cells of your body and it is the immune system’s job to protect, not attack those.
But with modern genetic immunotherapy, still in its infancy, the immune cells can be programmed to go after the cancerous cells (and ONLY the cancerous cells), and wipe out cancer entirely.
Here’s the update : the group working on this at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has another success story to report : 7 year old Avery Walker is cancer free!
For now, they are only testing this therapy on children who do not respond to the usual chamber of horrors that is modern chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
And that was Avery. At the age of 4 she was diagnosed with a particularly nasty kind of leukemia. Traditional therapies just did not work for her. It was time to take some risks.
And so far, it seems to have worked wonderfully. Avery is cancer-free and all she had to suffer through was a day or so of feeling a little under the weather.
Beats the hell out of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, doesn’t it?
Dare to dream of a world without cancer!