Brewing a Solution
Many Americans drink coffee, but no one really stops to think about what goes into the
process of making all that coffee. Caffeine is a pollutant, so disposing of it costs
coffee companies a lot of money. Many scientists are looking for a way to solve
this problem, and have potentially found a solution. Jeffrey Barrick of the
University of Texas at Austin discovered that genetically engineering bacteria
would save coffee companies lots of money while reducing the amount of caffeine
waste. Caffeine-rich waste is abundant in nutrients and could be beneficial if
Coffee companies could save it and sell it for animal feed. Barrick and his
colleagues figured out that pseudomonas putida bacteria have a mechanism for
chewing molecules, and that it could potentially be used to break down
caffeine. However, Escherichia coli is easier for scientists to manipulate in
the laboratory. So, by genetically modifying E. coli to have the chewing
mechanism from pseudomonas putida scientists would be able to make bacteria
that could refine the process of taking caffeine out of coffee. Initially, the
process did not work and the E. coli did not multiply, but once the problem was
fixed using a patch from another species, scientists had found a way to
streamline coffee production.
This article really
interested me because I drink coffee without realizing how bad the
process of making coffee is for the environment and the economy. Not only does caffeine waste harm the environment, but also wastes potential nutrients and a lot of money causing our coffee to cost way more than it actually needs to. However, besides the fact that
this interested me it made me realize that scientist are looking into how to
make the world a better place by helping the environment and figuring out how to save companies money.
See this article below for more information about Caffeine Pollution in the Pacific Ocean:
A Heroic Find: Shedding light
on the evolution of primates
The Chinese Academy of Sciences found a skeleton of a critter that was almost 55 million years old. Scientists made a 3D model of this critter, which showed exactly what this primate would have looked like. Apparently, it was a nimble animal, moving rapidly between the forests on all four limbs. Their various characteristics including large eyes and small teeth lead to the conclusion that this species had remarkable vision and great skills as insect hunters. The scientists later discovered that the critter also had features of a mammal called an anthropoid.
I found this article interesting because I learned a lot about this new species that I never knew existed. Without the scientists' devotion to their research, this intriguing discovery would never have been made and the world would not have known about its features that could have impacted our environment today.
This is another article that discusses the primate:
Oldest Primate Skeleton May Shed Light On Origins Of Tree-Dwelling Primates, Humans
Grassed up
Africa’s great grasslands are crucial to human evolution.
They are also said to be vital to why people walk upright. The transition took
place when the Savannahs themselves came into existence, replacing the
pre-existing forests with a different terrain. This forced human ancestors to
adapt or die out into species that were able to walk upright. Scientists know
this because of fossils that were found, marking this transition to have
happened 4-6 million years ago. So the subject that many scientists questioned
was if the change in the formation of the savannah coincided with these species
to walk upright. Sarah Feakins, of the university of southern California,
suggest not; however, she decided to further study this idea by exploring sediment
cores from the Gulf of Aiden, which is a place east of the African continent. There,
Feakins found plant molecules that date back to that time. These plants
contained carbon, and carbon atoms whose ratios gave away their history. Specifically
the ratio 12C to 13C can tell you what sort of plant made the molecule in
question. Plants usually tend to discriminate against 13C. Therefore, Feakins
was able to discover that these species have been there 12 million years ago
and that they changed over the millennia. These species, however, that were
able to adapt to dry conditions took over from those that preferred wetter
weather, but there was always some form of savannah. This was the reason that
people had suspected forests had given way to Savannah. However, on the
contrary to what Feakins showed, early humanity’s east African homeland was
actually never heavily forested so the idea that people were constrained to
walk upright by the disappearance of forests is completely wrong.
I found this article very interesting because I think it is
important to know about our past. It also fascinated me to learn that the
place where these species originated and the climate of their habitat actually
did not influence their walking abilities. I would have guess that that would
have strongly influenced their evolution.
Another link about evolution:
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2013/05/28/Study-African-terrain-may-have-pushed-humans-into-walking-on-two-feet/UPI-18681369768822/
Plant Communication
David Johnson of the University of Aberdeen believes he has shown that beanstalks are able to alert their neighbor to danger if aphids are attacking them. This experiment, which suggests this was a following up discovery, made by a Chinese team that when a tomato plant gets infected with leaf blight, other nearby plants would start activating genes that would help ward off the infection, even if the airflow between the plants were eliminated. Therefore, this caused many scientists to speculate, though they could not prove, that molecules in the plants were signaling danger to one another through a fungal network in the soil. Dr. Johnson was unsure weather the message could spread from plant to plant. So, he decided to find out in a way that was able to show if the fungi were the messengers sending these signals to other plants. Johnson and his colleagues did this experiment by setting up eight containers with five beanstalks per container. The plants were going to grow for four months and during this time every plant was able to interact with fungi in the soil. Each Beanstalk, however, reacted differently to the fungi. Five weeks after the experiment had began, Dr. Johnson covered all the plants with bags that only allowed carbon dioxide, oxygen and water vapor in and out of them, but that stopped the passage of larger molecules. At the end of the four months they found that the beans really did have a communication network, warning their neighbors to take evasive action. This article really interested me because I never knew that communications between plants occurred. I never even expected plants to be this complex. And even though the underground world is invisible to the human eye I believe that that should not be a reason to ignore or underestimate it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22462855
Research by Yvonne Kelly of University College, London, proved that the ancient wisdom, in which parents urged their children to sleep routinely at an early time, is not entirely correct. While daughters benefit from regular bedtimes, Kelly has shown that sons do not. She began her observations by viewing the connections between sleep habits and mental abilities in teens and adults around the world. Her data exemplified that sleeping schedules went hand in hand with poor academic performance. However, it was surprising to discover that not a lot of people had researched sleep habits for children under the age of 18. Thus, she and a team of colleagues began a multidisciplinary research project called the Millennium Cohort Study; an examination of bedtimes and cognitive abilities of 11,178 children. This project occurred when the children were nine months, three years, five years and seven years old. Kelly and her colleagues tested whether the children were read to before sleeping, had televisions in their bedrooms, or had a regular, set bedtime. To test their IQ’s, the children were also asked, at the ages of three, five and seven, to take standardized reading, mathematical and spatial-awareness tests. Dr Kelly’s report, just published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, shows that by the time children had reached the age of seven, not having had a regular bedtime did seem to affect their reasoning, even when other relevant variables such as bedtime reading and televisions were controlled for. But that was true only if they were female. Also, on the IQ scale, whose mean value is 100 points, girls who had had regular bedtimes scored between eight and nine points more than those who did not; however, boys were not completely unaffected. Irregular bedtimes left their IQs about six points below those of their contemporaries at the age of three. But the distinction disappeared as they grew older. We found this article important because we never knew that there was sleep a difference between the sexes. Even Dr. Kelly did not expect it and she has no explanation to offer for it.
http://healthysleep.med.harvard.edu/healthy/science/what/sleep-patterns-rem-nrem
Artificial Glaciers
As the climate gets warmer and
warmer, glaciers are starting to shrink; however, this has become a major issue
for farmers who rely on the melt water from them to irrigate their crops. The
melt water that farmers need to irrigate their newly sown crops used to arrive
in March or April. Now, the crops do not come until June, which is far too late
for the farmers to be able to make a living. However, Chewang Norphel, a
retired civil engineer who lives in the area, thinks he has the answer: if the
natural glaciers have gone, why not build artificial ones? That is what, for
the past decade or so, he has been doing. Moreover, he has built new glaciers
in places where they will thaw at exactly the right time, and emerge from a
narrow space into a wide space then empting their filling directly onto the
farmers fields. Later, he realized that the way to build a glacier is to slow
water’s flow and shield it from the sun. And that is what he and his team of
engineers are now doing. They have diverted several streams in the
worst-affected areas into canals that take long routes through shady areas.
They have also built stone weirs across these canals at regular intervals, to
slow the current down still further and encourage water to spill over the canal
banks. As the spring thaw sets in and the canals fill up, this overspill
freezes into a layer of ice. And as the process repeats itself over the ensuing
months, these ice sheets stack up and get thicker. So far, Mr Norphel and his
team have built a dozen artificial glaciers in this way. The largest of them is
a kilometre and a half long and two metres thick. Melt water from these
glaciers helps sustain the livelihood of thousands of farmers.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/02/120214-artificial-glaciers-water-crops-in-indian-highlands/
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