Matthew Denman Smith, Ph.D.

On safari with your body

Recent papers in Nature and PLoS One promise to revolutionize how we understand human biology and disease.  As part of NIH’s Human Microbiome Project, researchers used sophisticated genome sequencing techniques to discover that there are more than 10,000 microbial species inhabiting the human body.

Take a listen to this mind blowing discussion from NPR’s On Point about the myriad of functions performed by these  bacteria, fungi, and viruses; and how modern life is is thought to be altering our microbal “ecosystem.”  Well worth the listen!

Mechanisms of fear

Here’s a nice article By Amanda Schaffer (NY Times, May 28, 2012) that summarizes new research about how fish detect the presence of predators.  It’s really quite cool, and a little bizarre.  Keep in mind the concept of umwelt, and imagine what it might be like if we sensed our world in a similar manner.

When one fish is injured, others nearby may dart, freeze, huddle, swim to the bottom or leap from the water. The other fish know that their school mate has been harmed. But how?  In the 1930s, Karl von Frisch, the famous ethologist, noted this behavior in minnows. He theorized that injured fish release a substance that is transmitted by smell and causes alarm. But Dr. von Frisch never identified the chemical composition of the signal. He just called it schreckstoff, or “scary stuff.”

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Common Pesticide a Culprit in Declining Bee Colonies

The following article by Carl Zimmer appeared in the New York Times on 29 March 2012.

“Scientists have been alarmed and puzzled by declines in bee populations in the United States and other parts of the world. They have suspected that pesticides are playing a part, but to date their experiments have yielded conflicting, ambiguous results.  In Thursday’s issue of the journal Science, two teams of researchers published studies suggesting that low levels of a common pesticide can have significant effects on bee colonies”.  Read More

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Memorize This!

This fascinating video of Ayumu the chimp excelling at memory tasks has been going around the net.  The results of the study in the video were published by Sana Inoue and Tetsuro Matsuzaw (Current Biology 17:1004-1005).  Ayumu performed better at this memory task than humans, and younger chimps performed better than older ones.  They concluded that this ability was due to having better eidectic memory, which is ‘the memory capability to retain an accurate, detailed image of a complex scene or pattern’.  Pretty amazing.  I wonder how good you or I would be if we practiced this for years?

You can read more about eidectic memory here.