I hope I have posted this without a mistake

You must read this or I will cry, I'm very teary.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-25/malaria-testing-new-technology-to-battle-endemic-in-png/8385504

I couldn't find this on Youtube but it's only been showing on ABC 24 today.  I have written about
this experiment before but this is the first time it's been on the road for field studies.  Asssociate Professor Wood is a friend of mine and he and two other scientists have been working for years to get this testing kit funded and on the market.  Read right through as this is going to have an impact on us when warm area virus carrying mosquitos start to head down the coast.  Ross River Fever is already with us, who knows what will come next.

I hate humidity and I felt breathless just looking at the team working with the local villagers. 
The team have had to beg and scrounge for funding and I don't know how they had the patience to try and explain to politicians the science behind this technology.  If I knew how to I would email this article to every brainless twit in Parliament except our Pauline who would immediately condemn the mozzies as a muslim plot.

So take a minute and read the article.  If the link doesn't work, ABC news on line has it. 

Almost ten years to catch up.

Friday, December 14, 2007

FISH FARMING

Back in September 2006 I blogged about salmon farming and how the fish were given chemicals to achieve the level of colour that they got naturally by eating krill and wondered how long before it was realized it was cheaper to feed them the krill.

It wasn't long. Antarctic krill is already being overharvested to feed farmed salmon. Krill are tiny shrimp like creatures and are the staple diet of polar marine animals including penguins and whales. The krill are already under threat with the loss of the sea ice and parts of the ice shelf which forms the krill nursery.

The US National Enviromental Trust says fishing-industry figures indicate that a catch of 746,000 tonnes will be made n the coming season, 25 per cent above the quota set by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources.

The krill eat phytoplankton, everything else eats krill or the creatures that feed on krill. It's all about balancing the environmental ecosystems that exist in polar waters. I'm all for stopping whale hunts but we also have to take a good look at the smaller picture. 


Well anyone who watched the ABC programme this week will now know about the chemical they give Salmon for it's nice pink colour so we will pay a fortune for it.  Also the other stuff they feed the salmon instead of free ranging for food.
I'm all for Aquaculture but feeding great fish to Tuna so that it can be sold to some snobby Japanese or Australian restaurant for more money than I could rake up is right there with the salmon.
If the salmon don't get the krill or the chemical, the flesh would not be the bright jewell like colour everyone adores but just an ordinary fishy grey. I think it's nuts to find fish to feed other fish so we get to feed the profits.  Fish is a treat for me, I love it but not salmon, too rich and not raw tuna so I'm no fish snob.  Throw me a Barramundi like sardines to penguins and I would catch it without hesitation.

A gourmet meal for me is fish and chips from Queenscliffe, which has the best shop on the Bay. Find a nice corner on the sand, out of the wind, watch the waves and if one does want to put on airs, two paper napkins instead of one.

Science is not boring so watch and learn

I think I lost a few brain cells trying to get this Youtube on the blog so even if you don't like science stuff, stick with it and watch.
Such a simple device that could do so much good in the world and the scientists involved spend half their time begging for funds.  What else would you expect with a government that can barely spell science but can spell 'unemployed' to scientists at the CSIRO.
With the Zika virus now running rampant across the world, it's a shame that this is not at every airport where a simple test would detect an infected person before they entered the country.

The mining boom is over, the time of the science boom should be beginning.  It wouldn't even leave giant holes in the ground but it would save people.  But testing takes time and money before a profit is realized so the scientists are right back to begging.

 But here's a thought, since James is throwing his money, $10 million it's rumoured, away on a diamond ring for his current singing bimbo perhaps he could throw a few bucks for a much better cause and help 10 million people.

Paaarrppp!

Who else would I think of when reading an article about farting? Especially when Kath is such an expert on such matters and so ladylike about her little adventures.  Scientists now have a growing appreciation of the importance of gut microfauna and its noxious emissions.  But one person wants to know why, since farting is wonderfully rich in sounds, soft or loud, why we don't speak through our bum instead of our mouth.

It's not frivolous because it seems that no part of the human body has evolved specifically for speech.  We just speak through the same orifice that handles breathing, eating, drinking, vomiting and burping.  Did you say vocal cords?  They're only two flaps of tissue to act as a seal to keep food and drink out of the airway when we swallow.  So why didn't evolution turn itself upside down and using the spincter as a vibrating seal, make that end the speaking part? 

Because we have a mouth, tongue, teeth and throat to make sounds, actual speech instead of the paarrrp booom of the lower regions.  That's not to say it doesn't happen, all of us know people who do speak out of their rear ends, constantly.  Footballers could go through life without opening their mouth once. I suspect some politicians do the same but are such practised ventriloquists, we haven't cottoned on yet.

Which brings us to the humble herring.  Flatulent herring communicate by paaarrppp as do other fish, whales can dong a rumble that floats for miles but it has it's problems.  Orcas home in on the sound of the farty herrings and and flatulence becomes the dinner bell.

It's okay Kath, no Orcas in Geneva.

All you need is a camera and talent.

 I was fascinated by these images taken by photographer Svjetlana Tepavcevic when I came across them in New Scientist.  Being too lazy to get up and fetch the magazine before I wrote about them I thought I would just search for 'seed photographs' and did I get a bonanza of a site when I recognized one of her seed photographs.  I'd love to know why in a search for seed photographs I managed to get so many wedding photographs, strange.

Svjetlana became interested in seeds after finding a strange object near her house in Los Angeles.  She plans to publish a book of her photographs but in the meantime go here to see some brilliant examples of macro photography.

This is the inner lining of the seed pod of Marah macrocarpus or bigroot, a type of wild cucumber that twines around trees.

This is the seed pod of Koelreuteria elegans, the Chinese rain tree.

And a nutmeg seed still wrapped in its outer covering strands of mace.

Tomas Rak's speciality is photographing insects and don't do what I did and put it up as wallpaper and forget. It's a real heartstopper when starting up the computer in the morning.

This one is even better as wall paper if you have the nerve.

Don't miss looking at Corrie White's lovely water drops either or miss the wonderful macro images of snowflakes.  There are so many other images I think I'm going to enjoy Bloodyloud.com.

Glowing, glowing, glowing.

  
 A brilliant image taken by Yuri Beletsky (Las Campanas Observatory, Carnegie Institution) in the southern Atacama desert of Chile where the air is so clear the Magellan, the du Pont and OGLE project telescope domes were built just for the star gazing. The Atacama desert is so inhospitable that it's used for trialing equipment for planetary exploration.
On April 11, 2013 about midnight Yuri took this mosaic of 3 minute long exposures and revealed an unusually intense atmospheric airglow which is the light of electronically or vibration-rotationally excited atoms and molecules 80 km or higher. While the airglow looks like an aurora and is found at similar heights it's quite different in execution, aurorae come about by collisions of energetic charged particles and airglow is from chemical reactions to the Sun's ultraviolet radiation.
Beside the airglow, just about at centre of image is the faint bluish cloud called gegenschein, German for "counter glow" which is sunlight back-scatered off small interplanetary dust particles. These dust particles are millimetre sized splinters from asteroids and orbit in the ecliptic plane of the planets. Far right in the image is the Milky Way rising above the Magellan telescopes.

Nobody tell me if I got my airglows and aurorae mixed, my mind seized up in the finish.

Out of disaster, great ideas.

I was reading a small item in the paper last week when a dingdong went off in my brain and I went searching through my huge file under the inspiring title of "Blog Fodder". I knew the article I wanted was there, after all I'd just spent a day going through the pages, throwing out anything I'd lost interest in or technology had raced by it.

What started my 'Indianna' search was reading that New York city officials are still cleaning up debris from the World Trade Centre.  They had another 560 cubic metres of material including some found after the demolition of the former Deutsche Bank Building.  Since 2006, the remains of 34 additional victims have been identified, mostly from DNA analysis.

I had kept an interview from 2008 given by anthropologist Professor Richard Gould.  His wife was working near the Twin Towers on the day of the planes and three weeks after the towers came down Richard Gould, walked to Ground Zero.  In the grey ashy residue lying everywhere in lower Manhatten, he found fragmented human remains even a piece of human scapula.

He realized then that remains would be found a great distance away.  He wrote and pestered those in charge to listen to him and go further afield but already the washing down hoses were at work and he knew what was being lost.

In 2002 he was finally invited by the medical examiner's office to do a trial excavation outside Ground Zero and this was the start of his Forensic Archaeology Recovery Group, a team of volunteers who help recover human remains after disasters.

Work was finally stopped at Ground Zero early March, 2008 but human remains were still being found way outside the immediate area.  Paper containing human blood stains was found in Brooklyn, several miles from Manhatten.  Professor Gould thinks they will still be finding material for years as it works its way underground even now remains have been found in underground pipes.

Nearly 3000 lives were lost but around 1,100 to 1,200 people remained unidentified in 2008 but in 2013, victims identified have gone up to 1,634.  Disaster archaeology is an outgrowth of archaeology, using the same methods to find and identify remains of recent disasters as they do find physical data of ancient disasters.  The team cleans up the human remains and physical effects left behind so they can be identified for forensic and legal purposes.  The team must record exactly where, when and how they were found as this is important for the court proceedings following any disaster.  Their archaeological skills such as surveying, site recording, sieving material and DNA collection are all important as is their ability to work as a team. This team ethic is important for their mental health,  recovering humans remains will never be easy, it's stressful and counsellors are often needed.

One man's good idea has helped survivors of many disasters over the years.  

Big hole.

This is Stickney Crater on the martian moon Phobos.  Stickney is over 9 kilometres across which is nearly half the diameter of Phobos itself.  Astronomers think that the impact that blasted out the crater probably came close to shattering the moon.
The crater is named after Chloe Angeline Stickney Hall, mathematician and wife of astromomer Asaph Hall who discovered both Martian moons in 1877.
The image is colour-enhanced and was recorded by the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaisse Orbiter as it passed Phobos in March, 2008, at a distance of 6 thousand kilometres.
Phobos does have surface gravity but it's less than 1/1000th of Earth's gravity and it's thought that the streaks in the photo might have been loose material sliding down inside the crater walls over time. The light bluish regions near the crater's rim could indicate freshly exposed surface but the mysterious grooves along the surface may be related to the crater-forming impact.

So great photo of a hole on a moon about which we know not much.

I can't give you an amount of money spent on Mars exploration or the current wars on Earth but I wish it could all be given over to oceanography so we can find out about our own planet before it ends up looking like Mars.

I don't begrudge a cent spent on the Hubble Telescope though, the images it has sent back to Earth has increased our knowledge of Space more than we could gain by roaming the galaxies in tin cans.

Just what we've been praying for....

Yes dear blog ladies, a female viagra.

We get to self administer a dose of testosterone gel in our nasal passage a couple of hours before we think we might have a sexual encounter.

The testosterone will be rapidly absorbed through the nasal lining, resulting in a sudden rise in levels throughout the day.

This is good news for women with sexual difficulties and will be available by prescription in a few years.

It's also going to make the pharmaceutical group a truck load of money.

It's supposed to be a boon for partners with mismatched libidos.

It's not supposed to have side effects if you rev up but don't engage the engine.

It's supposed to be for women who are concerned about their husbands' feelings because wifey doesn't swing from the rafters whenever they get it on.  Goddess bless those fragile egos.

Please don't let my beloved synchrotron to have been used in making this.

But please use the synchrotron to come up with a dose of something that will make 95% of Australian men attractive enough so that I would want to take a sniff of female viagra.

Our big blue Earth.

Jack Cook from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Howard Perlman of USGS made this image of Earth without its water covering. The oceans cover about 70% of the surface but they're shallow compared to the Earth's radius.



That blue spot is made up of all the water and is about 700 kms in radius, less than half the radius of our moon. It doesn't show water that may be trapped beneath the surface and research is still in progress to find out how this much water came to be on Earth in the first place.
 
Spooky!

From Jupiter to us.

This is the Easter special.  An image taken from the Cassini spacecraft of the moon Io against the background of Jupiter. 

Updating the Synchrotron

Let's have a nice round figure for the Synchrotron to make it a world class facility, $300 million.

Victoria has already spent $725 million on Myki with more to come.....or not if they've got any brains and cut their losses. I mean it's a ticket system, it won't come up with a cure for any debilitating or deadly disease.

Poker machines taxes are estimated to deliver (rip off more like) $1.031 BILLION to the state in the next financial year.

They're hiding the Grand Prix balance sheet.

Makes $300 million look like good value for money unlike the Minister for Innovation, Ms Asher.

I love our Synchrotron

Microtechnology and nanotechnology have the capacity to revolutionise virtually all aspects of manufacturing.

Microtechnology is engineering on the scale of one millionth of a metre. Nanotechnology is engineering on the scale of one billionth of a metre, or at the scale of an atom.Micro-scale and nano-scale objects such as miniaturised electrical and mechanical devices have unique physical and chemical properties, for example greater flexibility or strength.

Rice, barley and other cereal grains are important energy sources for many millions of people around the world. Unfortunately, diets that rely too heavily on these relatively poor sources of nutrition are often low in important micronutrients such as iron. In response to increasing global concern about dietary deficiencies, Australian researchers are using synchrotron techniques to investigate various strategies to improve the levels of iron and other important micronutrients in these staple food grains.

CSIRO’s Jose Varghese and University of Melbourne collaborators used x-ray crystallography at the Australian Synchrotron to reveal the structure of a key protein involved in Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers fused the protein to a shark antibody to stop the protein from self-assembling.

"The Australian Synchrotron has huge engagement and investment from life sciences," says Dr Andrew Peele. "Probably half of our beam lines have significant involvement with life scientists, such as through protein crystallography looking at protein structure, but also our small and wide angle X-ray scattering beam lines, which can engage with the structures of proteins and solving the problems of function of the mechanisms inside cells.

One of the challenges for in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) is the failure rate, especially in older women where less than one in four cycles are successful. Monash University’s researchers hope that synchrotron light can improve the success rate. "We’re using the infrared beamline to study how mammalian eggs mature. Our hope is that we will be able to better assess the viability of eggs for use in IVF." The synchrotron gives a much greater capacity for analysis at the subcellular level – looking at the processes occurring within the single egg cell.

It’s one of a range of projects that researchers are involved with, watching living red blood cells affected by malaria, sickle cell disease and other blood disorders, and monitoring how single cells respond to drugs.

Other projects involve visualising cells for cancer diagnosis, organ donation, heart disease, stem cell research and algae research. Much of this work will benefit from access to synchrotron infrared light.

"The beauty of the synchrotron and the infrared beamline is that we can apply it to any cells. We are only limited by our imagination."

All these projects and more are now in danger because of a funding stoush between State and Federal governments. State Innovation Minister Louise Asher has refused to commit to the facility, which is due to run out of funds in June next year. It needs $156 million over five years to continue operating but its operators say it needs $294 million to make it world-class. Ms Asher is blaming the former Labor government of leaving "black holes" in the synchrotron's funding.

Having friends who use the facility, I know how much time and effort is spent in writing for grants to continue their research. The synchrotron isn't free for their use nor for any other scientist who comes to Melbourne to use it. How much money would you invest for a treatment for Alzheimer's?

Put $294 million against what the Grand Prix is going to cost us in the next few years.

A gas guzzling brmm brmm festival for revheads who like to gawk at little cars and scantily clad pit crew bimbos which gives us precisely nothing to benefit Australians unlike this lovely big miracle machine.

Twinkle, Twinkle

This is a night view of the Nile River and Delta from the International Space Station.

The Cairo metropolitan area is the very bright area where the river flows into the Delta. The photograph also shows the eastern coastline of the Mediterranean - the Tel-Aviv metropolitan area in Israel and Amman in Jordan. The lights also show the coast line of the Sinai Peninsula and the city lights of the island of Cyprus at the top of the image.

The thin yellow curving band at the top of the image is airglow, a faint band of light emission that results from the interaction of atmospheric atoms and molecules with solar radiation at nearly 100 kilometres above the earth.

NOT CUTE

This is Bagheera kiplingi, the first vegetarian spider known to science.

It was discovered in Central America and goes after plants as a primary food source.

Out of 40,000 known spider species, this is the only one who hunts plants.

Told it wasn't cute, fast, agile and it jumps.

**********

The human body is estimated to be home to 100 trillion living microbes. We're a buffet of saliva, sweat, dead skin cells, food particles between our teeth and our digestive system.

I vote yes for phone sex.

**********

Now for our lovely Kath, some vital infartmation. There are scientists who specialize in fart research (bet you didn't know that) and the world is divided into smellies and inflammables.

Smellies have sulphate reducing bacteria which produce hydrogen sulphide especially if they're diet is high in sulphurous foods such as eggs, white bread and red wine.

Inflammables have methane-making bacteria. Methane is odourless but this is the one that lights up the world if you put a match to it.

(Kath I'd love to be there when you tell your lovely daughter that you have a new party trick for parent/teacher night)

**********

And now for something completely different. I received my order from the Chocolate Mill this morning, very early, so early I didn't have half my teeth in but remembered not to smile at the delivery man. I had to sign one of those dinky little electronic machines that makes your signature look like ants crawling away from a jumping spider.

It was a big box, goodie says big stomach. So I'm searching through crumpled newspaper like a child through cheval merde looking for the pony and find a minute box in the bottom. I swear it was so small it could have been sent in a CD package but I'd forgotten I'd ordered chocolate covered licorice as well. I did a quick check, yep, 16 truffles but so little. I looked at the hand made chocs at Southland which are selling for 2.95 each and calculated that what I spent was less than buying 16 of these. I haven't touched them, they're for Egg Sunday. Five days, I have five days to go.

ANOTHER IGNORANCE IS BLISS POST

The weight of bacteria in and around the human body is approximately 1.25 kg.

I presume that's a washed body.

Try not thinking about that when coming home through a mob of teenagers.

That's the final argument for not sharing a bed with another body.

On the other hand, it means that 1.25 of this flab isn't mine.

Triple chocolate ice-cream for dessert.

There's always a silver lining somewhere.

I'M FAMOUS

I always knew my inner glow came from starlight and here I am. That's the star Rigel and to the left is the Witchhead Nebula. I tell you, I've never looked better.

THE TROJAN HORSE IDEA

The large orange bit is an amoeba and it's using a false foot called a pseudopod to reel in a bacterium, green bit. The bacterium is Legionella pneumophila and is the cause of Legionnaires' Disease but instead of being digested by the amoeba, it stays safely inside this 'trojan horse'.

Scientists began using the term about 15 years ago to describe Legionella pneumophila, the bacteria eventually traced as the cause of the mysterious disease that broke out among people attending an American Legion convention in Philadelphia in 1976. It sickened 221 people and killed 34.

Epidemiologists traced the cause back to water in air-conditioning tanks on the roof of the building where the Legionnaires were meeting, but they still had trouble finding Legionella within that water. It turns out that high concentrations of Legionella were living within the protists that lived in the tanks.

Legionella were reproducing within these protists and coming out in small aggregates that became airborne in water droplets. Susceptible people breathed in high concentrations of Legionella that had just come out of their hosts and were looking for new hosts.

The image is from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and Dr. Barry S. Fields.

101 USES FOR AN EX-HUSBAND

Scientists believe they can make an artificial human brain

within a decade, after successfully replicating

parts of a rat brain.

And I thought he was totally useless.