A Schooner of Science

Shape-shifting devices, gadgets for the future

// April 29th, 2013 // No Comments » // Recent Research

I’ve always wanted a computer that would fold up like a newspaper. I could sit on a bench and open it to read, then close it up and cram into a bag. It wouldn’t be backlit like a computer screen, just a soothing paper-like display. There’s something lacking in e-readers today that look terribly phoney. As in, they look like giant phones or tablets. I want one like a book, an extremely lightweight paperback.

That’s been the dream since before iPhone’s were released, and it looks like it’s a step closer now. New prototypes for shape-shifting mobile devices were unveiled today at the Computer-Human Interaction Conference CHI2013 in Paris. They transform on demand, bending up to hide personal information or curving around to make a console for playing games. The press release says they can even curl into a stress ball, which doesn’t sound very healthy for a smart phone, though I can imagine it might come in handy.

Here’s a nifty video of the “Morphees” in action.

There are a few different ways the researcher’s achieved this kind of movement. Some prototypes used wires attached to motors that pulled and pushed them. Others used memory wire, which reverts to its original shape when heated by running a current through the wire.

The research was led by Dr Anne Roudaut and Professor Sriram Subramanian from the University of Bristol. They have also introduced a new metric to help guide the developing industry – “shape resolution.” Like screen resolution, shape resolution allows different devices to be compared easily, measuring the ability to stretch, bend, curve and so on.

On a related note, researcher Roel Vertegaal from Queen’s University is working on thinfilm phones, called the world’s first paper computer. The work was presented at the same conference, CHI, in 2011. Here’s a quick video. Looks incredible.

Pretty keen to head over to the next CHI conference, which is in Toronto on April 26, 2014. Though it might be easier to get to the 2015 one in Asia, as it’s a bit closer to Australia. For more info on the conferences, check out the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction.

Carnivorous snails, so how does that work?

// April 22nd, 2013 // No Comments » // Recent Research, The Realm of Bizzare

Three new species of brightly coloured carnivorous snail have been found in the limestone hills of Northern Thailand.

Each of the species is only found on one or a handful of hills, some of which have become limestone quarries. Pretty impressive, as a quarry is not a friendly habitat for an animal whose main predator is the boot.

As well as coming in a range of fancy colours, the new species are characterised by nothing less than the shape of their genitals. All from the Perrottetia aquilonaria has a club-shaped penis and penial hooks (sounds painful?), while P. dermapyrrhosa has a long penial sheath, long, scattered penial hooks and vaginal hooks.

It seems like snail penises are a common way to distinguish between species, and there must be quite an art to it. Take this rather lengthy description of P. aquilonaria’s junk.

“Genitalia with a long, slender penis; penial sheath short, about half of penis length; internal wall of introverted penis with black to brown penial hooks; vas deferens passes through a short section of penial sheath before connecting distally to penis; vagina and free oviduct short to long, vaginal hooks may be present; gametolytic duct and sac may not extend as far as albumin gland; seminal vesicle present with about the same length from vesicle to talon.”

If you click through to the complete article, published open-access on peer-reviewed ZooKeys, you can even see some pictures of penial hooks and vaginal corrugated folds. Come on, what else are you going to do with your day?

It all sounds rather saucy, and top-notch science research, but I got caught up on this idea of a carnivorous snail. I mean, what IS that? It sounds like something from an old Doctor Who episode, back when the creepy alien du jour was footage of maggots, zoomed in so they looked gigantic. These day’s it’s terrifying ghosts with their mouth all screamy and sideways and it looks like something from The Exorcism of Emily Rose.

They may not be lions and tigers, but carnivorous snails are nonetheless vicious. Some of the species we have in Australia are small and are probably in your garden right now, others are big black ones that live in the Victorian rainforest.

Carnivorous snails hunt other snails, following their slime trail until they catch up with them. Now, most snails have a tongue like a rasp, and they eat lettuce leaves and such by simply licking them away with their tongue-which-works-like-teeth. Carnivorous snails upsize the rasp for big-ass hooks, and when they catch up with their prey they give them a lick and stick their hooks in.

If you’ve ever poked a snail, you know they slip inside their shell and produce gross foam to stop you poking them (no means no). Unfortunately they try the same trick when they get licked by a carnivorous snail, and the attacker has already shoved its hooks in so the snail unwittingly sucks the hunter right into its shell with it. Then the predator just licks away until there’s nothing left.

Actually, that does sound like a creepy Doctor Who episode.

Carnivorous snails also hunt worms, hooking ‘em and eating ‘em like spaghetti. There’s a great discussion of carnivorous worms on land and sea here on the ABC Radio website.

The research was performed by Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok and the Natural History Museum, London.

Siriboon, T., Sutcharit, C., Naggs, F., & Panha, S. (2013). Three new species of the carnivorous snail genus Perrottetia Kobelt, 1905 from Thailand (Pulmonata, Streptaxidae) ZooKeys, 287, 41-57 DOI: 10.3897/zookeys.287.4572

Toothbrushes and breath testers for tuberculosis

// January 15th, 2013 // No Comments » // Recent Research

Tuberculosis is a major health issue, with around a third of the world’s population infected with the bacteria mycobacterium tuberculosis. Not all these people actually have signs of illness, only 10% will go on to have any symptoms during their life. For the rest it remains latent, the bacteria is present but not causing any problems.

As tuberculosis is only contagious and dangerous when it’s active, that’s usually what people test for. Chest x-rays can check whether TB has affected the lungs, and are required for people travelling from high-TB countries to low-TB countries including Australia and the United Kingdom. The other avenue for diagnoses is the slightly grosser method of analysing the gunk people cough up, to see if there’s bacteria in it. For  mycobacterium tuberculosis, growing a sample in agar takes weeks.

A breath test would be a much safer and faster way to see if bacteria are present in the lungs, and that’s what our first paper is looking at. Researchers from the University of Vermont are finding out whether bacteria can be identified by their “chemical fingerprint,” a cocktail of chemicals that makes its way from the lungs to the breath. Their research is published in the Journal of Breath Research.

Now, it’s some time before police can pull you over for a quick TB test when you’ve been swerving off the road from a coughing fit. “Honestly, it’s just the flu!” But it’s got to be a cheaper option for many countries with low health care budgets.

It is early research. They studied the tiny puffs from mice, rather than humans, and looked at two different bacteria that cause lung infections Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus (Golden staph), neither of which are the TB bacteria. Clearly there is more research to be done, but it’s a promising start.

Read more about it here.

TB can be cured with a course of antibiotics, or more specifically a combination of several antibiotics that have to be taken for six months. Like Golden Staph, the bacteria that causes tuberculosis is becoming increasingly drug resistant. Drug resistant strains need different antibiotics and take 18 months or more to cure.

In Papua New Guinea, extensively drug resistant TB is a problem. A recent outbreak there and movement of patients to better health facilities in Queensland and the Torres Strait Islands has triggered alarm and, frankly, scaremongering media reports and political backlash. You can read about it on the Conversation, because I’ve been out of Aus too long to be in on the goss (but I’m back in a month, yay!)

The next weapon against drug resistant TB may come in the unlikely form of a traditional toothbrush. The South African toothbrush tree contains a compound called diospyrin, which inactivates an enzyme critical for bacteria reproduction (but does not affect the similar enzyme found in human cells.) The enzyme is a DNA gyrase… would you care to know how it works?

When DNA is replicated, the two strands normally joined in a double helix are broken apart, and you can imagine it’s like putting your fingers into a rope and pulling apart the strands. If this imaginary rope is a circle (as DNA in bacteria is) then it can’t just unwind itself at the ends. Instead, things will get messy, and the DNA will coil and twist up on itself. These “positive supercoils” are a bit like like twisting a shoelace until it bunches up, and is bad for the DNA. Gyrases relax the positive supercoils by cutting the DNA and moving one strand to the other side, then joining them up again.

Circular DNA supercoiling. Image by Richard Wheeler.[/caption]

By stopping gyrase activity, the bacteria can’t replicate its DNA. The research by a team from the UK and South Africa described how this compound from the toothbrush tree interferes with gyrase, and importantly, that it acts in a different way to existing antibiotics. This will hopefully be a chink to exploit in the armour of drug resistant bacteria.

Here’s the paper from the Journal of Biological Chemistry and the press release.

New species of supercute slow loris

// December 15th, 2012 // No Comments » // Recent Research

With huge eyes peering through a bundle of fluff, slow lorises are the epitome of adorable. Just look at that face!

And that’s just what scientists have done – looking at the facial markings of slow lorises to identify one completely new species, and officially recognising two more as unique which had previously been considered possible sub-species.

The distinctive markings that separate the species include the mask-like patterns around the eyes and varying shapes of cap on the head. The newly described species, Nycticebus kayan, is named after a river running through their habitat in Borneo.

It’s their toxic bite that makes slow lorises unusual among primates.

More unusually, the toxin isn’t produced in the mouth but in glands on the arm. Licking or nuzzling the gland, they mix the toxins with their saliva to create an irritant.

Not only do they use it for defending themselves, but they also spread their spit onto their young, protecting them too.

Bit like a grandparent spitting on a napkin to rub the dirt off your face. Except afterwards you have AWESOME TOXIC POWERS! Still gross though.

Unfortunately, lorises are endangered due to habitat destruction and the fact that they’re so damn cute, everyone wants them as pets. Illegal animal trade has taken a toll.

Still, it’s hard to imagine an animal like this going extinct. Insects and spiders, you know, they just haven’t got the same marketing department. Although, having said that, snow leopards are beautiful as well, and it sounds like they’re close to going extinct in the wild, so you never can tell.

Thinking about endangered animals makes me so sad! I saw a David Attenborough documentary a few days ago about his life and how the planet has changed and a couple of species had gone extinct since he saw them. Just made me feel a bit crap for being a human.

Still, even Attenborough did some silly things when he was young (like eating a clutch of sea turtle eggs), and his work has probably saved thousands of animals by now. People change.

So there’s always hope! Because a world without slow lorises in it… well, it’d be no kind of world at all.

More info at Wiley press releases.

Powering devices with the battery in your ear

// November 10th, 2012 // No Comments » // Recent Research

Did you know there’s a battery in your inner ear? It was news to me when I found this on EurekAlert.com. Turns out not only is there a natural battery, but a group is working to utilise it to run medical devices.

The natural role of your ear battery is to turn sound vibrations into electrochemical signals, which travel down nerves to the brain. An imbalance of sodium and potassium ions (as with nerve cells) is created using cells that pump ions back and forth across a membrane – this is the battery.

It’s crucial for good hearing, and could be tapped to power devices.

Though it is very low voltage, the team was able to harness a small proportion of the natural battery to power a radio transmitter. In the future, this transmitter would be coupled to a sensor, and send data about how the ear is performing to a nearby computer.

During the experiment they used a guinea pig (literally) as a substitute for a human ear. The guinea pig responded normally to hearing tests, even with the implant. The chip itself was located outside of the guinea pig’s ear, but would fit inside a human’s middle ear cavity. We have got bigger ears than guinea pigs, after all.

They estimate it would take between 40 seconds to four minutes to build up enough juice to run the radio transmitter, but after that it keeps itself going.

To get around the lag time, they could send a burst of radio waves to provide that initial power – a kick-start.

It’s one of many developing technologies to explore new ways to tap into existing energy. Cell phones that can power themselves from the mechanical vibrations of being tapped, touched or carried are also in the pipeline. Rolex has been powering its wristwatches for decades using movement energy it collects when worn.

This research could open new ways to study the inner ear for people with hearing difficulties or problems with balance. It could also provide treatments, such as by improving hearing aids. All with the battery in your ear!