FRITZ-HABER: DESTROYER AND CREATOR

 Ever wondered what cool sciencey stuff they are teaching undergraduates at the University of Queensland?

 Every school day I will post my newly learned cool fact... Enjoy

18/03/2013

CHEMISTRY

FRITZ-HABER: DESTROYER AND CREATOR

Perhaps one of the finest examples of how scientific progress can be used for both good and evil comes from Germany in the early 20^th century.

A man named Fritz Haber was born in the mid-19^th century and he reached his careers peak during a time when Germany and Europe was gearing for war.

Fritz was an especially talented chemist and created a process for the synthesis of Ammonia from Nitrogen gas.

As we know form the ‘Deep Diving… How deep can we go?’  (http://forscienceuq.blogspot.com.au/2013/02/deep-diving-how-deep-can-we-go.html) the atmosphere is composed of a lot of nitrogen. And getting this element out of the atmosphere and into a product we can use was a huge advancement.

The process he created allowed the mass production of huge quantities of fertiliser that fed hundreds of millions of people and still contributes greatly to the global economy.

However,

Ammonia can also be used to create explosives.

Haber famously said “During peace time a scientist belongs to the world, but during war time he belongs to his country."

Ammonia can produce huge explosions

Because of this invention of ammonia synthesis, Baber was directly responsible for Germany’s ability to wage World War One for as long as she did, and as such, he is responsible for the deaths of millions.

Not only this, but Baber also was instrumental in the development of Germany’s chemical warfare division and his team built chlorine gas for deployment in the brutal trench warfare. 

After the war he also designed and built an insecticide called Zyklon A. This would later be used by the Nazi Party to produce Zyklon B. Famous as the chemical used in the gas chambers to slaughter millions of Europeans of all nations.

Ethically Barber defended himself as a man who served his country and that death in the trenchers was terrible no matter how it was delivered.

As time progresses, it will be inevitable that the numbers of individuals that were aided by this man’s brilliance will continue to grow.

Yet he will always remain, as a gaunt and powerful example, to the inhuman nature of science, and how inventions can be used for both good and evil.

BIO-DOMES

Ever wondered what cool sciencey stuff they are teaching undergraduates at the University of Queensland?

 Every school day I will post my newly learned cool fact... Enjoy

18/03/2013

BIOLOGY

BIO-DOMES

The environment that we live in is like a giant life support system.

It cleans our water, 

  

It cleans our air,

It provides us with food 

It provides us with all of the materials we need to build our homes and develop our lives.

Scientists have attempted to research this for years, and we have made great strides forward in understanding how this systems and cycles work.

Yet interestingly we are yet to create a truly self-sustaining system.

For many years NASA has been trying to build Bio-Domes.

Bio Domes are a concept creation where they are sealed areas except for light.

So for example Bio Domes are kind of like green houses.

They let light in, but they are sealed from anything else coming into or out of the dome.

It is an experiment to see if science has enough of an understanding of the laws of nature to create an area that can support human life.

Only problem is that so far they have been met with failure after failure. 

From concrete walls absorbing oxygen, to irrigation systems not creating a proper water cycle, all bio domes at this point have not been successful.

Research into this concept continues to this day and we are starting to get some successes in this field.

But if there is one situation that clearly shows how little we know about our natural world, it has to be that we can’t even replicate it when we are given every building block.

EATING BACTERIA: HOW CAN THIS BE A GOOD IDEA?

Ever wondered what cool sciencey stuff they are teaching undergraduates at the University of Queensland?

 Every school day I will post my newly learned cool fact... Enjoy 

15/03/2013

GENETICS

EATING BACTERIA: HOW CAN THIS BE A GOOD IDEA?

(Note - This is an actual assignment submitted for grading at UQ)

WHAT COULD BE GOOD ABOUT EATING BACTERIA?

Eating bacteria as a vaccine? If a scientist in a white lab coat with crazy hair and thick glasses tried to convince you to drink a big tub of wreathing bacteria, would you do it?  This is exactly what a research scientist at QE2 Medical Centre in Perth is trying to design. Whilst Dr Barry Marshal is not such a stereotype, he is indeed taking this strange concept extremely seriously. In 1981, Dr Barry Marshal and another scientist Dr Robin Warren were investigating the possibility that it was bacteria that was the cause of human stomach ulcers. In the early 1980’s science in general had not properly identified the type of organism we now know as extremophiles, and the idea that bacteria could survive in such a hostile environment as an acid filled human stomach was unproven.  After trying to identify and culture the bacteria they found within our stomachs, Dr Marshal and Dr Warren were able to link Gastritis to bacteria, and they won a Nobel Prize for it. So now, Dr Marshal’s plan is to genetically modify and then add bacteria to the human body by digestion to ‘trick’ our immune system into a response, just like a vaccine.

WOW! SO HOW DOES THIS WORK?

The ‘trick’ is an artificial ‘infection’ in the body that has the ability to induce an antibody response. Your stomach provides an incredibly powerful first line of defence against an infection, so to get this artificial infection into your body, doctors usually have no choice but direct injection. The extremely interesting thing about Dr Marshal’s extremophile bacteria (Helicobacter) is that it can withstand the powerful digestive acid defences of the human stomach. Helicobacter has been now linked to ulcers, gastritis and cancer. Yet it seems that Helicobacter evolved to live in our gut in an almost symbiotic, sometimes beneficial way. It evolved as lifestyles in the past weren’t conducive to the negative effects. Dr Marshal plans to genetically splice them with common flu. The design would be a Helicobacter combined with protein receptors attached to it that would be identical to the common flu. This would trigger an immune response for both the helicobacter and the flu virus. If they could do this, then they could also attach other virus receptors and could potentially design a drink that would ‘vaccinate’ you against 4 or 5 different diseases. But not only this, because this new immunisation process is grown, as Dr Marshal says “You would just need to borrow the Guinness factory fermenter for 8 weeks and you could have upwards of 200 million doses.” This is incredibly important in our globalised world where diseases can spread internationally in less than 24 hours. Finally but certainly not least of all, unlike vaccines which quickly go past their used by date, the Helicobacter could be stored in dormant stage in a large library ready to be quickly grown and then deployed.

DRINKING BACTERIA: IS THIS A GOOD IDEA OR NOT?

It seems to me personally that this is the beginning stages of a revolution in medicine and science. The old adages of the 19^th and 20^th century are being swept away as science uses the natural world to our benefit. Imagine a world with genetically engineered Helicobacter spliced with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) in it. Imagine that these bacteria are designed to attack specific cancer cells within our bodies. It would be a bacterium that is taken via a pill and digested, once in our system it is ignored by our immune system and moves to attack and digest cancer cells. This idea comes from the days when my father was diagnosed with Prostate cancer. Speaking to the doctors who treated him they all spoke of the future for medicine and how our current methods were unfortunately primitive. While we do have a lot of work to do before we are at this dreamt of future, this trigger has shown me that we are at the very beginning of this revolution. Whilst I am personally convinced that this is the future, there are many traditional beliefs of science and society that must change. The stereotypical scientist is indeed changing in social mindset. Yet genetic engineering still has many challenges it needs to face in the public image. Genetically Modified (GM) crops are still viewed with intense suspicion by the public. Elements within the Greenpeace movement see it as a major threat to the world and have even gone as far as to physically destroy research GM crops. Once projects such as this one are shown to be the great benefits they are, you too will be thinking that drinking bacteria is a good idea.

WHEN DID HUMANS FIRST START WEARING CLOTHES?

 Ever wondered what cool sciencey stuff they are teaching undergraduates at the University of Queensland?


 Every school day I will post my newly learned cool fact... Enjoy 

14/03/2013

GENETICS

WHEN DID HUMANS FIRST START WEARING CLOTHES?

Genetic research shows that anatomically modern humans (AMH) appeared around 200,000 years ago.. It is extremely likely that they out competed their more primitive hominid cousins in other climates due to a series of technological advances and complex behaviours.

One of which was the development of clothing.

Clothing allowed humans to live in colder climates as they were protected from cold related body stress. This meant that they could live higher latitudes. And it also meant that they could survive colder glaciation periods.

 So when did humans first start wearing clothes?

 

Archaeologists first started to answer this question from physical evidence. Firstly, they found eyed needles for clothes production. These needles, made of bone, first appeared around 40,000 years ago. But this signals the arrival of complex clothing, not the start of it. 

One archeologist wrote “it would be unlikely that complex needles and thread arouse simultaneously with clothing use”.

So they could say with certainty that we had clothes from this 40,000 year ago point. 

There is also physical evidence of hide scraping tools, but these are from over 780,000 years ago. 

Hides can be used for many different things, shelter construction, carrying bags. Not necessarily clothes

Despite these hide scrapping tools, it seems likely that modern humans outcompeted previous species of homonym because of our use of clothing. And AMH did not appear until around 200,000 years ago.

This confusing and conflicting information was all that was available to answer the question till within the last decade. Indeed it has been as recently as the last few years the puzzle has been put together by genetic evidence.

And this has come from an unlikely source:

Parasites often provide an extremely valuable look into the genetic history of their hosts and humans are no different. 

Investigating from the genetic variation of the different types of lice that attack humans we can deduce some amazing things. 

Firstly, we can look at the divergence of genetic history between head lice and pubic lice. From genetic research done earlier in the previous decade,  we can see that head lice diverged genetically from pubic lice between 1.2 Million Years ago and 3 Million Years ago.

So we can deduce, that it was during this time that homonyms started to lose their body hair. 

The head louse is now a very different species from the Pubic dwelling cousin. 

As hair coverage on homonyms reduced to the very top of the head, the head louse became more and more specialised for living on in our hair.

However, the clothing louse diverged genetically from the head louse only very recently. 

Due to the nature of human development it is extremely unlikely that a divergence from its lineage would have been caused by anything other than the presence of clothing as a biological niche for the louse to fill. As Toups, Kitchen, Light & Reed,( 2011) put it “… determining when head and clothing lice began to diverge provides a date by which clothing must have been in regular use by humans.”

Basically scientists have taken elements from the head louse DNA and elements from the clothing lice DNA and analysed its genes sequences. They were looking for these Genes  

-              COI

-              18s RDNA

-              EF – 1(alpha)

-              RPII

Basically they took these genes from the lice and compared them to see the differences. The result of this genetic research was consistent with known human development. 

For example, (interestingly) the results showed that all head lice seem to have come from a population size of around 0.934X10+6, which is a considerable bottleneck for these tiny little insects. In other words we were that close to eliminating them. 

This would have been the result of body hair loss to the top of the head, not active human attempts. Post bottleneck stage shows, that a significant proportion of this small population becomes part of the divergence into clothing lice. 

This is perhaps a representation of how quickly the lice filled the new niche. Now for the part I’m sure you have all been waiting for.

Using this new latest study, when did humans start wearing clothes?

Well, as you can see from this graph there are the major events in human development, estimated time of body hair loss, first evidence of hide scrapers, first evidence of tailored clothing (the bone needle) etc.

The grey line shows the likelihood that the lice had genetically diverged into a new population. 

From the collective research of the genetics the median head louse clothing divergence is at  170,000 years ago.

 And the red area is the presence of a glaciation period where mean world temperature would have dropped.

This is all consistent evidence that supports the statement.

So...

 

Thanks to genetic research of parasites we are able to state that it is most likely that humans were wearing clothing around 170,000 years ago.