Curio Cabinet

Life in its myriad forms can be as benign as a blade of grass or as deadly as a virus. Mirror life, on the other hand, might exclusively be the latter. As more scientists are researching synthetic “mirror” cells, others are warning about the potential harm they may cause. Here’s a little known fact: proteins, DNA, and other building blocks of life are either “right-handed” or “left-handed”, in a way. It’s a property known as chirality, where the structure of these biomolecules only come in one orientation. DNA, for example, is famously structured in a helix form, but that helix only twists in one direction, no matter the life form. It seems like a trivial detail, but it actually has huge implications, and if someone were to craft synthetic DNA that twisted in the other direction, it wouldn’t work the same way. Scientists compare this to a left hand trying to fit into a right-handed glove and vice versa—sure, they look similar, but their mirrored orientation makes the glove unusable for the opposite hand.
 
While scientists have managed to create mirror nucleic acids and proteins, creating synthetic life from these building blocks isn’t possible…yet. Nevertheless, it is an emerging field of research, one that some Nobel Prize winners and other experts are warning against. The reason for the alarm stems from the fact that mirror life forms could pose dangers to regular life forms. Mirror bacteria, for instance, could lead to disease that no organism has any immunity against. With no ability to resist them, mirror bacteria could potentially destroy entire ecosystems or cause a catastrophic pandemic. Still, proponents of mirror-image biomolecules believe that they could lead to more effective drugs and medical treatments. Drugs made of mirror molecules would be more resilient against being broken down by the body, allowing them to be more effective than conventional ones. However, the fact that they’d be so hard to break down is exactly what makes them so potentially dangerous. In the paper where the aforementioned experts warn against mirror life, they compare them to an invasive species that would be difficult to contain. In other words, the fear is that these mirrors could cause a lot more than seven years of bad luck.

That’s some weather they’ve got there. With its planet-engulfing dust storms, Mars is both terrifyingly violent and awe-inspiringly beautiful. Recently, scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder have figured out just what gets the Red Planet’s storms going. Photographs taken by rovers on the surface of Mars, while extremely impressive, can be somewhat deceptive. Most of the photos depict a serene, empty landscape of rocks and dirt. What they don’t usually show are the planet’s frequent, massive dust storms that can grow to cover millions of square miles and last for days at a time. Storms of that scale are unheard of on Earth, yet they happen regularly on Mars. Fortunately for the rovers, Mars’ thin atmosphere means that the wind from these seemingly violent storms can’t really knock them over. They can simply bury the rovers in dust, though, rendering them inoperable, as was the case with NASA’s Opportunity rover, which died in 2018. The reason for Mars’ many, enormous dust storms was something of a mystery until recently. But Heshani Pieris and her colleagues at CU Boulder might have found the culprit: high temperatures. Pieris and her team looked at data collected by the Mars Climate Sounder instrument aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter over the last 15 Earth years, or 8 Martian years. What they found was that 68 percent of the major dust storms were preceded by periods of rising temperatures, which might allow great quantities of dust to rise up into Mars’ atmosphere. Still, there are more factors than just temperature at play. In a statement through the university, Pieris said, “This study is not the end all be all of predicting storms on Mars. But we hope it’s a step in the right direction.” Today’s forecast: Windy with a lot of dust.

[Image description: A starry sky with some purple visible.] Credit & copyright: Felix Mittermeier, Pexels
 

You’re not likely to find this bird in a pear tree, but it’s still a holiday celebrity. It’s the perfect time of year to learn about partridges (as in “a partridge in a pear tree” from the Christmas song, 12 Days of Christmas). Despite their portly, soft appearance, these little birds were actually included in the song due to their surprisingly brave demeanor.
 
There are many species of partridge, but the kind from the Christmas song was likely a gray partridge, which is native to western Asia and Europe. It was introduced to North America in the early 1900s, and still roams the continent despite not being native. Because they were once so plentiful in Hungary, gray partridges are sometimes called Hungarian partridges, or simply “Huns” by hunters. As their name implies, they have mostly gray and white feathers, though there’s a bit of orange around their throats. Like most game birds, gray partridges are large enough to make a decent meal, weighing a little over a pound. Like other members of the pheasant family, they spend most of their time on the ground, in open grasslands, foraging for seeds and insects. Though they’re capable of flight, they typically don’t fly far, and only when threatened. They even sleep on the ground, huddling together with other members of their social group, called a covey, which can include around a dozen birds.
 
Mother gray partridges are famously protective of their young. Nesting on the ground leaves them vulnerable to many predators, like foxes and birds of prey, all of which are larger than partridges. Despite the size imbalance, mother gray partridges will claw and peck at any adversary. Since they're willing to give their lives in defense of their young, 12 Days of Christmas uses a partridge as a metaphor for the Christian figure of Jesus. Other birds in the song also serve as Christian references, such as the two turtle doves, which represent the bible’s two testaments. Metaphorical or not, live birds don’t really make the best Christmas gifts—especially not 184 of them in the span of 12 days.

 
[Image description: An illustration of a gray partridge, a bird with gray and white feathers, with an beak and feet.] Credit & copyright: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the American Foundation for the Maud E. and Warren H. Corning Botanical Collection 1963.594.40.b, Public Domain, Creative Commons Zero (CC0) designation.

Cancer treatments have come a long way, but this new one goes back in time. Scientists at Wistar Institute in Philadelphia have developed a new way to treat ovarian cancer using a nearly-forgotten technique from over a hundred years ago. Any type of cancer can be unpredictable, but ovarian cancer is exceptionally difficult to treat. It has the lowest survival rates among gynecological cancers due to its resistance to chemotherapy. Once ovarian cancer metastasizes, or spreads to other parts of the body, it tends to straight for the peritoneal cavity to the stomach and intestines, where the body maintains a naturally immunosuppressive state. This means that tumors in those areas are largely unaffected by the body’s immune system and are free to spread further.
 
When dealing with such an aggressive, treatment-resistant cancer, it would seem that the answer might be ever more advanced, state-of-the-art treatments. However, Wistar Institute’s Nan Zhang, Ph.D. and his colleagues took a different approach. They looked back in time to some of the earliest cancer treatment research from the late 1800s and early 1900s, specifically at the work of William B. Coley. Coley was a renowned surgeon in his time and is known today as the father of immunotherapy. His most notable work was his revolutionary treatment of bone cancers at New York Cancer Hospital, where he injected patients with “Coley’s toxins.” The “toxins” were a mix of dead pathogens that, when injected into the tumor, had a cure rate of around ten percent. That might not sound like much, but before Coley’s treatment came along, there were no viable treatments at all for many types of cancer. After his toxins were proven to work, they became the go-to treatment for thirty years, until the advent of radiation therapy. Scientists have known for a while that Coley’s toxins worked by activating myeloid cells, which play a key part in immunity, essentially “waking them up to the cancer’s presence. These cells happen to be plentiful in the peritoneal cavity. Researchers are using their own “toxins”, namely pathogen-derived β-glucan and interferon-gamma (IFNγ), to activate the myeloid cells. Now if we could just come up with a more palatable name than “toxins.”