March 2016 – Little Bits of Science

What Happened to the Hitomi Telescope?

Launched on February 17th, the Hitomi telescope is an X-Ray telescope commissioned by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). While everything looked fine for the telescope during testing done since launch, when it was time to power up for real work this past Sunday, the satellite was strangely quiet.

Engineers have been unable to determine the health of the satellite since the sudden disruption in communications, JAXA said, although ground controllers received a brief signal from Hitomi.

Shortly after the go-live time, the US Joint Space Operations Center, which tracks space debris, picked up 5 objects orbiting near where the satellite was or was supposed to be. Work is now underway to determine what happened to the Hitomi, as well as to see if the 3-year mission can be salvaged or not.

Whatever the cause of the problem, don’t count Hitomi out yet. “The interesting thing about the Japanese is they tend to be very good at resurrecting things that would otherwise be dead,” says Jah. For instance, JAXA recently maneuvered the Akatsuki satellite into orbit around Venus, after the probe had been adrift in space for five years.

Toxoplasmosis and Rage Disorders

Because at Little Bits of Science we seem to love writing about poop stories, here’s another fecal-related story to catch your eye:

Uncontrollable, explosive bouts of anger such a road rage might be the result of an earlier brain infection from the toxoplasmosis parasite, an organism found in cat feces, a new study finds.

NASA Sees Monster Stars

Thanks to another amazing photo by the Hubble telescope, scientists have discovered the largest stars we have ever seen.

The image shows the central region of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The young and dense star cluster R136 can be seen at the lower right of the image. This cluster contains hundreds of young blue stars, among them the most massive star detected in the Universe so far. Using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope astronomers were able to study the central and most dense region of this cluster in detail. Here they found nine stars with more than 100 solar masses.

An international team of scientists using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has combined images taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) with the unprecedented ultraviolet spatial resolution of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) to successfully dissect the young star cluster R136 in ultraviolet light for the first time.

Caffeine and Miscarriage Risk

I love my caffeine. So much so that I got a tattoo of the molecule on my arm. That said, people need to be aware of the potential risks.

A new study conducted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) suggests couples who consume more than two caffeinated beverages daily in the weeks leading up to conception may have an increased risk of miscarriage. The research, conducted with authors at the Ohio State University, similarly found women who drank more than two daily caffeinated beverages during the first seven weeks of pregnancy saw an increased miscarriage risk. Previous studies have drawn similar links, but researchers hadn’t been able to single out caffeine as a particular culprit.

So while the benefit of caffeine is really great, it’s not all fun and games. Exercise caution – moderate your intake, and consider doing without during the pregnancy.

Puppy Poop for Goodness!

Seems science has a lot going on in the world of poop right now. The latest news is a bit on curing puppy diarrhea with fecal transplants. Veterinarians looking to prevent diarrhea in kennel puppies may have a new option:

A veterinarian in Palmetto, Florida this week revealed a technique that uses poop transfers to successfully treat service puppies in-training that suffer from recurrent diarrhea, a common problem for dogs kept in kennels. The method reportedly cured 87 percent of dogs in the first round and 93 percent of those needing a second treatment.

That’s some pretty good numbers for preventing potential problems for pups.

Lobsters Don’t Live Forever

So there’s a meme going around (at least, I’m seeing it on Facebook and Instagram) that suggests jellyfish and lobsters are basically immortal. lobster photo Well, Smithsonian Magazine is here to teach us that no, lobsters are not immortal.

The viral scientific tidbit can be traced back to a brief 2007 news story that reports that lobsters don’t show typical signs of a phenomenon known as senescence. In plain terms, the report says that lobsters don’t age the way other living creatures do—they don’t lower their reproductive ability, slow their metabolism or decrease in strength. This led to extrapolations that lobsters, if left undisturbed, can’t die.

So it’s a fun story to read, but it’s sadly false. And it makes me hungry.

Photo by stu_spivack

Jellyfish Poop!

Videos of pooping comb jellyfish stun evolutionary biologists:

No buts about it, the butthole is one of the finest innovations in the past  540 million years of animal evolution. The first animals that arose seem to have literally had potty mouths: Their modern-day descendants, such as sea sponges, sea anemones, and jellyfish, all lack an anus and must eat and excrete through the same hole. Once an independent exit evolved, however, animals diversified into the majority of species alive today, ranging from earthworms  to humans.

I don’t want to spoil the punchline, but comb jellyfish aren’t such potty mouths – this suggests that either scientists have been wrong about jellyfish digestion, or later animals lost the trait after splitting from an ancestor which had an anus. Either way, this opens up more research areas for scientists and may further define our understanding of evolution.

Prairie Dog Serial Killers

Aw, those sweet little prairie dogs. Always a hit at the zoo. Adored by many because they are just so dang cute! Turns out there’s a wicked side to them, however, as some prairie dogs are just serial killers of squirrels in cute little packages.

The rabbit-sized herbivore’s relations with the ground squirrels that forage alongside it often explode into murderous attacks – with some prairie dogs biting squirrels to death on a regular basis.

This is thought to be the first time that one mammalian herbivore has been seen routinely killing members of another herbivore species.

As to why, well, it seems there is some benefit to the family of the serial killers over the families of non-serial killer prairie dogs. That is to say, the serial killers had more offspring than non-serial killers, and the serial killers had survival rates nearly three times their less maniacal brethren.

Photo by Gary Yankech

Women in Science – Dr. Maud L. Menten

To start my Women in Science series, I’ll present information on a scientist with whom I share a birthday – Dr. Maud L. Menten, Biochemist from Canada. Born in Port Lambton, Ontario in 1879, Dr. Menten graduated from the University of Toronto in 1913 (some sources say 1911). Later in 1913, she was an author for the article “Die Kinetik der Invertinwirkung” which introduced the Michaelis-Menten equation, used to relate the reaction rate of an enzyme to the concentration of a substrate.

The reaction rate increases with increasing substrate concentration $[S]$ , asymptotically approaching its maximum rate $V_\max$ , attained when all enzyme is bound to substrate. It also follows that $V_\max = k_\mathrm{cat} [E]_0$ , where $[E]_0$ is the initial enzyme concentration. $k_\mathrm{cat}$ , the turnover number, is the maximum number of substrate molecules converted to product per enzyme molecule per second.

Her contributions to science continued long after the Michaelis-Menten equation. She made additional discoveries/co-discoveries relating to hemoglobin, blood sugar, and kidney functions. Because women were not generally able to work in the medical field in Canada at the time, she ended up working mainly in the US with some time spent in Europe, as well.

Dr. Menten continues to be honored today by the Dr. Maud L. Menten Memorial Lecture Series.

The Dr. Maud L. Menten Memorial Lecture Series is held annually by the Department of Biochemistry. Two mini-symposia and at least eight lectures will be held each year. The speakers are expected to be active, high-profile scientists and are nominated by the Department of Biochemistry research community. Invitations are sent after selection of the speakers by the Dr. Maud L. Menten Memorial Lecture Series Committee.

Double Mastectomy Rates on the Rise, but Survival Rates Steady

A study covering 20 years of treatment for breast cancer in California shows a significant rise in rates of double mastectomies, but no significant change in survival rates as a result.

The researchers looked at the medical records of 189,734 California women who were diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer in one breast from 1998 to 2011.

During that time, the overall number of women who chose to have double mastectomy increased from 2% in 1998 to 12.3% in 2011. This increase was even larger in women younger than 40:

. . . (survival rates given) . . .

The small difference in survival rates between the women who had lumpectomy plus radiation and the women who had double mastectomy wasn’t statistically significant, which means it could have happened by chance and wasn’t because of the difference in treatment.