Curio Cabinet

em>It's Flashback Friday! Today is Clean Up the Earth Day, a day meant to mark the progress made since Earth Day, six months ago. Enjoy these curios all about protecting the environment.
 
Let's have a serious conversation about sheep farts. The gaseous emissions of sheep are a serious contributor to global warming. That's because sheep farts are pure methane. While methane makes up only about 10 percent of damaging emissions, it is 28 times more effective at trapping heat than the average greenhouse gas. And most of the planet's methane emissions come from the burps and farts of the several billion sheep and cattle roaming the earth. So it makes sense that scientists are looking for ways to settle sheep tummies. A team of researchers just released a new study analyzing the gut bacteria of sheep. First, they grouped their test sheep into "high methane emitters" and "low methane emitters" and then they looked for differences in their microbiomes. The guts of high emitter sheep had many more microbes called methanogens—tiny bacteria that eat hydrogen and turn it into methane. Low emitter sheep had bacteria that didn't produce methane, including acetogens, fumarates, and nitrate and sulfate reducers. Based on their findings, the scientists believe they could potentially reduce sheeps' methane emissions by adding diet supplements that starve their guts' methanogens of hydrogen. Other recent studies have found that feeding livestock seaweed or tropical leaves can have a similar effect in reducing methane. This is all very interesting but I can't stop wondering whose job it was to sort the sheep into the high emitter and low emitter groups. And how exactly did they do it?
 

Image credit & copyright: bogdan.hoda/Depositphotos
 

It's Flashback Friday! Today is Clean Up the Earth Day, a day meant to mark the progress made since Earth Day, six months ago. Enjoy these curios all about protecting the environment.
 
It’s usually not great when things fall apart en masse...unless we’re talking about plastic waste. Notoriously non-biodegradable, plastic makes up about 12 percent of the world’s solid waste each year, and scientists have long cautioned that we’re running out of places to put it all. Now, we may finally be glimpsing a solution. A team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley recently published a study in the journal Nature about their creation of a biodegradable plastic which breaks down in just a few days when exposed to heat or water.
 

Although biodegradable plastics have been around for a while—the first one, made from cellulose, was invented in 1862—their production hasn’t helped the world’s pollution problems much. That’s because most biodegradable plastics still take a very long time to break down, and most can’t be recycled. This new plastic is different. It contains enzymes, cellular proteins that create chemical reactions, which essentially digest the plastic when it’s exposed to moderate levels of moisture or heat, such as those found in home composters. “Enzymes are really just catalysts evolved by nature to carry out reactions. If you want to get a material to become a part of nature, we should go with what nature has already developed,” materials scientist and study co-author Ting Xu explained in a statement. Researchers were able to show that their enzyme-laced plastic broke down significantly after just three days in compost, and was entirely gone within two weeks, with no harmful microplastics left behind. Nature sure moves quickly!

[Image description: two cups of compost with new, enzyme-laced plastic on top. The right cup shows the progression of decomposition over three days, with just a few bits of plastic remaining. ] Credit & copyright: Adam Lau/Berkely Engineering
 

Who knew that butterflies were cybersecurity experts? At the Institute of Physics, Belgrade, Serbian technology student Marija Mitrovic Dankulov recently created a unique security fingerprint inspired by butterflies. The technology, called Teslagram, is created from the tiny scales which make up butterflies’ wings. A single wing can contain up to 200,000 scales, each with its own unique pattern of chitin, a natural material that makes up the exoskeletons of most arthropods, including insects. To create a Teslagram fingerprint for a hackable object such an electronic door lock or debit card, a butterfly scale is attached to the object beneath a protective material. The scale’s information would be entered into a databank, just as a human fingerprint would. However, unlike a fingerprint, the pattern on butterfly scales would be difficult to replicate with current hacking technology. Currently, Teslagram is being tested by Vlatcom, a Serbian security company which is using it to protect their electronic door keys. However, Dankulov believes that Teslagram has the potential to protect everything from government files to fine art. “Let’s say a museum wants to loan a very valuable art piece out to some gallery,” she said, in an interview with FRE. “Currently, when that artwork is returned, the museum has to pay some specialist to ensure that what they got back was the original artwork.” With Teslagram, however, such art could be fitted with its own unhackable identity marker, giving museums peace of mind. Turns out, nature can be pretty adept at solving the problems of the digital age.
 

[Image description: Close-up photo of a blue morpho butterfly resting on a pink flower. ] Credit & copyright: Efraimstochter, Pixabay
 

On October 6, scientists at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Harvard University published a paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B announcing their discovery of a new species of tardigrade. Also known as water bears, tardigrades are microscopic animals famous for their ability to withstand extreme conditions. Given the name Paradoryphoribius chronocaribbeus, this new specimen is only the third fully-intact tardigrade fossil ever found. Making it even more unusual is the fact that it was fossilized in amber. This makes it the clearest and best-preserved tardigrade fossil found thus far. In fact, the researchers have said in a press release from New Jersey Institute of Technology that the amber even preserved the 16-million-year-old creature’s “needle-like claws,” which are “20-30 times finer than a human hair.”
 
Phil Barden, senior author of the study, described the fossil as a “once-in-a-generation event,” noting that, despite their long history on our planet, “they are like a ghost lineage for paleontologists with almost no fossil record.” Part of what makes it difficult to find their fossils is that, despite being extremely resilient organisms capable of withstanding even the vacuum of space, they are microscopically tiny. The specimen found by Barden and his team is barely over half a millimeter, and it was actually mistaken for a “faint speck” in the amber for months. According to Barden, amber is “capable of safely enveloping and preserving organisms as minute as water bears and even individual bacterium.” Seeing the fine details, however, requires some serious technology. Marc A. Mapalo from Harvard’s Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology used high-powered laser confocal fluorescence microscopy to image the specimen inside and out. Mapalo says that they were able to find “combinations of characters in this specimen that we don’t see in living organisms now…we can now explore evolutionary changes this group of organisms experienced over millions of years.” That’s a lot of knowledge in a very small package.

 
[Image description: An electron microscope image of a tardigrade.] Credit & copyright: Schokraie E, Warnken U, Hotz-Wagenblatt A, Grohme MA, Hengherr S, et al. (2012). Image cropped for size.

Don’t take credit for granted. On this day in 1943, Albert Schatz discovered streptomycin, the first antibiotic to be effective against tuberculosis. Before its discovery, infected patients had few options for treatment, and were often sent to sanatoriums to be isolated and, if they were lucky, recover. When Schatz was working as an assistant to Selman Waksman at Rutger University, the latter was asked by William Feldman of the Mayo Clinic to work on an antibiotic that could treat tuberculosis.
 
Waksman declined, afraid of working with tuberculosis samples, but at Schatz’s insistence, Waksman allowed him to work on finding a cure, albeit alone. A few months into his experiments, Schatz identified two strains of streptomyces griseus that inhibited the growth of M. tuberculosis. One strain came from a throat swab taken from a chicken, and the other came from a field near Schatz’s home in New Jersey. Shortly after, Elizabeth Bugie, another researcher at the university, identified streptomycin as the chemical responsible for the antibiotic effect, which was then isolated by Schatz. A paper announcing the discovery was published in Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology, credited Schatz, Bugie and Waksman as authors, in that order.
 
However, according to the book Women in Microbiology, Waksman excluded Bugie when the patent was submitted because she was a woman. Waksman and Schatz both agreed to receive a symbolic amount of $1 for the patent and sign over royalties to the Rutgers Research and Endowment Foundation. Publicly, Waksman began to claim sole credit for the discovery of the streptomycin, and Schatz filed a lawsuit when it was revealed several years later that Waksman privately arranged to receive 20 percent of the royalties from the foundation. As a result, Schatz was given legal recognition as a co-discoverer and 3 percent of the royalties. Of the remainder, 10 percent went to Waksman and 7 percent was split among the rest of the lab workers at the time of discovery. Yet, Waksman was the sole awardee of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1952 for the discovery, a decision The Lancet called “a considerable mistake.” While the legacy of streptomycin is mired in scandal and greed, the antibiotic has saved countless lives. Still, credit where credit is due.

 
[Image description: A black-and-white photo of Selman Waksman sitting in front of laboratory equipment.] Credit & copyright: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection/Sun staff photographer: Roger Higgins/Public Domain

You know you're quite the scientist when your name is synonymous with “genius.” On this day in 1933, Albert Einstein arrived in the U.S. from his native Germany. While almost everyone alive today knows at least something about Einstein, such as the fact that he proposed the theory of relativity, there are also a great many myths circulating about the famed physicist. Some truths from Einstein’s life (and death) could also easily be described as stranger than fiction.
 
Albert Einstein was born March 14, 1879 in Ulm, Germany. Despite the myth that he was a poor student who failed his childhood math classes, Einstein actually excelled in mathematics. By age 12, he had taught himself algebra and Euclidean geometry. It is true, however, that Einstein didn’t care for the rigid structure of mathematical instruction, or for school in general. In 1895, he enrolled at the Argovian Cantonal School in Aarau, Switzerland. While there, Einstein met his future wife, then-20-year-old Mileva Marić. She was the only woman in the school’s six-student mathematics and physics teaching diploma course. After obtaining his federal teaching diploma in 1900, Einstein began applying for jobs in academia, but had a difficult time finding one. Since he had a habit of skipping classes and challenging established teaching techniques, his professors hadn’t left him glowing recommendation letters. In 1902, a year before Einstein married Marić, he landed a menial job at the Swiss Patent Office. The position turned out to be a perfect fit for Einstein, who used the free time the job afforded him to produce some of his most brilliant work.
 
1905 is often described as Einstein’s “miracle year.” While continuing to work as a patent clerk, Einstein published four papers referred to as the Annus Mirabilis (or “marvelous year”) papers. They outlined complex physics concepts, such as the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity and mass-energy equivalence. Einstein would eventually earn a Nobel prize for his discovery of the photoelectric effect, a phenomenon in which electrons are released from material when it is struck by electromagnetic radiation, such as light. This discovery proved that light possessed particle-like qualities. However, Einstein’s most famous works were those on special relativity and general relativity. The theory of special relativity postulates that an object’s mass, and the energy required to move it, become infinite as the object approaches the speed of light. This means that objects can’t travel faster than light. Einstein’s famous formula, E = mc2, in which “E” is energy, “m” is mass and “c” is the speed of light, was developed in relation to this theory. His theory of general relativity states that, rather than being an invisible force that attracts objects to one another, gravity is an actual warping of space. This theory was controversial until May of 1919, when English astronomer Arthur Eddington tested it during a solar eclipse. Eddington discovered that the gravity of the sun caused nearby starlight to warp. In the six years following Eddington’s research, over 600 books and articles were written about the theory of relativity, and Einstein became a true celebrity, even beyond the scientific community.
 
Einstein came to the United States in 1933 and was forced to claim refugee status, since he had Jewish ancestry and couldn’t safely return home during Hitler’s rise to power. During World War II, Einstein first wrote the U.S. Government urging them to build nuclear weapons, fearful that the Nazis would create them first. He later came to regret the role he had played in the invention of nuclear bombs. Einstein became an outspoken advocate for pacifism and other leftist causes, earning him the ire of J. Edgar Hoover, who had the FBI spy on Einstein for decades. Other governments had a much more favorable view of the man. In fact, in 1952, he was officially asked to become President of Israel. He declined the offer, citing inexperience in politics. The oddness of Einstein’s life didn’t stop at his death, in 1955. In fact, after his death it was discovered that he and Mileva Marić had conceived a daughter together, before they were married. To this day, no one knows what happened to the child, who was referred to only once in letters between Einstein and Marić as “Lieserl.” Then there’s the saga of Einstein’s stolen brain, which you can read more about here. Even after his death, it seems that everyone wanted further insight on or a literal piece of the world’s most famous scientist.

 
[Image description: A 1921 black-and-white photo of Albert Einstein in a suit, standing in front of a chalkboard.] Credit & copyright: Public Domain