Just for fun: Small world competition

Since 1974, Nikon has hosted the Small World Photomicrography Competition. Photographs must involve some type of light microscopy but can encompass any subject.  Prizes are given for originality, informational content, technical proficiency and visual impact.


The 2011 grand prize winner was this submission by Igor Siwanowicz of the Max Planck Institute.  In case you don't recognize the creature depicted below, it's a lacewing larva magnified 20x.





You can see all the winners and honorable mentions here. Personally, I like the following picture of a 630x magnification of freshwater ciliates undergoing conjugation, submitted by Gerd Guenther.





If you'd like to enter the contest next year, here are the rules.  Make sure your entry is in by the April 30, 2012 deadline.

Hot flashes can persist for years after menopause

This was the unfortunate conclusion of a study conducted by scientists from King’s College London and from the Gynecological Cancer Research Centre.  If you are in the majority of women who will suffer from either hot flashes (HF) or night sweats (NS) during menopause, you may have over a decade of symptoms to look forward to.

The researchers sent questionnaires to 15,000 post-menopausal women, asking them about their menopausal symptoms.  Of the over 10,000 respondents, 90% had experienced HF and/or NS on a regular basis, and over half of them were still experiencing those symptoms even though it had been an average of ten years since they went through menopause.

There are factors that can affect the severity of menopausal symptoms.  Smoking, alcohol consumption, anxiety and weight all have negative effects on menopause.  That’s no surprise.  What's disconcerting is that the symptoms last for so long. 

As author Myra Hunter states:

Health professionals need to be aware that women can still have hot flushes and night sweats in their late 50s and 60s.

Don’t be so quick to target invasive species

Invasive species can wreak havoc on an ecosystem.  A case in point is the notorious ship rat (Rattus rattus), which has been an unwelcome guest at every port visited by humans.  The North Island of New Zealand can thank the ship rat for the nearly complete elimination of all native vertebrates.  Unfortunately, many of the native plants relied on those vertebrates for pollination services.  But don’t worry, this story does have a happy ending.  A substitute pollinator has apparently taken over the duties vacated by the missing vertebrates.  That creature is… the ship rat.

David Pattermore and David Wilcove of Princeton University studied the pollination of three native New Zealand plants growing on North Island and in a nature reserve called Little Barrier Island.  Although the native vertebrate population had been depleted from North Island, it thrives in abundance on Little Barrier Island.  Surprisingly, the pollination rate for the plants was similar in the two areas. 

The primary pollinators on Little Barrier Island are the endemic birds and bats.  On North Island, that job is done by ship rats and by an introduced species of bird known as the silvereye.  Apparently, ship rats had replaced the very pollinators that they drove to extinction. 

This creates a tricky problem for conservationists trying to hold back the flood of invasion by non-native species.  Scourging ship rats from the North Island would do the native plants no favors.  After all, the plants don’t care whether it’s a rat or a bat that carries their pollen around.   The more that is understood about the current role of introduced species within an ecosystem, the better those locations can be managed.  At the very least, every effort must be made to reintroduce native pollinators before removing invaders.

You can see Pattermore’s explanation below.

How to build a superheavy element

Two teams (one from the University of Oslo and the other an American/Russian team from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia) are competing to create the world’s heaviest element with an atomic number of 119 (meaning that each nucleus contains that numbers of protons).  Want to get in on the action?  Here’s what you’ll need:

1.  The ability to smash two smaller atoms together in such a way that they combine to form the new heavier element.  
You’ll want a particle accelerator for this step.

2.  The proper ingredients.

To create an element with 119 protons, you’ll need to start with some pretty heavy atoms.  Such atoms themselves tend to be radioactive, meaning that they only last so long before decaying, an event measured in ‘half-lives’ (the amount of time required for half the substance to disappear). The labs working on the superheavy element race are trying to combine Berkelium (atomic number 97; half-life of 320 days) with titanium (atomic number 22).

3.  The ability to detect any successful fusions.

The physicists don’t expect to create more than one atom of element 119 per month, each of which will have a half-life of less than a microsecond.  You’ll need an ultrafast and powerful detector if you don’t want to miss one.

Of course, there is another way to create superheavy elements (those with atomic numbers above 104), but it requires starting with a supernova.

New and improved lithium ion batteries

Lithium ion batteries are a common component of many consumer electronic products, such as cell phones.  Unfortunately, current lithium ion batteries don’t last as long as we’d like.  Innovations by Harold Kung and his colleagues from Northwestern University may soon change that.  They’ve developed a battery that lasts ten times as long.  It recharges much faster as well.

Briefly, lithium ion batteries work by shuttling lithium ions from the anode (negative end) to the cathode (positive end). Once all the lithium atoms have arrived at the cathode, the battery is dead and must be recharged by reversing the flow (which is done by applying a higher voltage to the battery).  How long a battery lasts is limited by the number of lithium ions available to move through that battery.

Currently, anodes are constructed from layers of graphene, which is a form of carbon.  Although carbon has the advantage of being stable, it takes six carbon atoms to hold each lithium ion.  In contrast, you can pack four lithium ions onto every atom of silicon, a considerable improvement.  Regrettably, pure silicon tends to shatter during charging.  The solution? Combine the two materials.

The researchers placed clusters of silicon between layers of graphene.  The new anode can hold many more lithium ions than plain graphene, but is much more stable than pure silicon.  By adding some silicon to the anode, the scientists have created a much more powerful battery. 

Not only have the Northwestern researchers greatly increased the charge capacity of their batteries, but they also decreased the recharging time required.  As I said, lithium ion batteries are recharged by forcing the flow of the lithium ions back from the cathode to the anode.  The scientists effectively gave those ions a shortcut by cutting tiny holes in the graphene/silicon lattice through which the ions could plunge.

Taken together, we may soon have a battery that lasts much longer and recharges much more quickly than anything on the market today.  Well, I say soon, but the authors predict that it will be at least three years. 

Insect power

You’ve seen the cartoons of engines powered by hamster wheel. Well, University of Michigan engineers led by Ethem Aktakka are designing motors that use green June beetle (Cotinis nitida) power.  Specifically, they converted the kinetic energy of wing flapping into electricity.  Each beetle can generate up to 115 µW of power, enough to power tiny sensors or cameras carried by the insect.

A piezoelectric beam attached to a Green June Beetle reveals the optimum location to scavenge energy and shows that up to 115 µW total power can be generated from the insect’s body movements. 

Image credit: Aktakka, et al.

The beetles used for these tests were all tethered.  The researchers attached piezoelectric beams to various parts of the insects’ bodies to see which configurations generated the most power.   Of course, the point isn't to attach insects to treadmills for energy production. Eventually, the beetles would be free flying, taking their sensing payloads into small or dangerous spaces. 

You may be wondering, as I was, how you persuade a beetle to investigate the exact locations you need visited.  As you can see in the video below, it turns out that insects can be controlled rather handily by the application of a few implanted electrodes.

In fact, it turns out that it’s easier to manipulate a living insect into doing what you want than to build a robot to do the same thing.  The green June beetles in this study were not asked for their commentary on this point.

Tiny wasps have lost their nuclei

Fairy wasps (sometimes called fairyflies) are extremely small insects.  At 200 micrometers in length, seven of these tiny parasites could fit across the head of a pin. So how does this multicellular wasp squeeze its cells into the space some organisms reserve for a single cell?  In part, by shedding nuclei from their neurons.

Fairy wasp (Megaphragma mymaripenne) shown compared to a paramecium and an amoeba.

Credit: Alexey Polilov.

Alexey Polilov of Lomonosov Moscow State University compared the neurons of adult fairy wasps with those of fairy wasp pupae.  Although the juvenile neurons appeared completely normal, up to 95% of the adult neurons were missing a nucleus.  While there are cells that routinely lack a nucleus (red blood cells, for example), neurons are not usually among them. 

Needless to say, this is rather odd.  After all, neurons are pretty important cells.  If an organism wanted to get rid of excess mass, I wouldn’t think it would do so by tampering with its neurons.  Still, these insects are able to function perfectly well, so maybe nuclei are overrated. 

Hat tip:  Jennifer Ouellette.