Will Powdered Rhino Horn Cure My E. Coli? (a quiz)

It's Inkfish's 100th post! I considered celebrating by listing my top 100 stories, but instead I'm bringing you this review of recent science news.

By the way, if you've eaten any European produce lately and are feeling unwell, please stay off of airplanes. The TSA is after you, anyway.


1. At an undisclosed location in the northeast, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is currently testing a system that will:

a. employ explosives-sniffing ferrets

b. identify people who are thinking about committing a terrorist act

c. scan travelers in 3D, so screeners (wearing 3D glasses, naturally) can get an even more accurate look at your body

d. scan your shoes without requiring you to take them off


2. As of Thursday night, the E. coli outbreak in Europe had killed 30 people and sickened more than 2,800. The culprit has now been identified as:

a. sprouts

b. cucumbers

c. broccoli

d. lettuce


3. In the Czech Republic, the world's eighth-to-last northern white rhinoceros has died of old age (she was 39). All species of rhino have been unfortunately favored by humans for their horns. Which of these is NOT a traditional use of rhinoceros horn?
a. dagger handle
b. aphrodisiac
c. treatment for fever
d. treatment for gout


4. After a delicate joint effort, scientists in China and Scotland are anxiously waiting to find out whether they've successfully mated a pair of:
a. white rhinos
b. pandas
c. cloned cats
d. giant corpse flowers


5. Seven scientists in Italy will be tried on manslaughter charges because they:
a. accidentally released a dangerous virus
b. approved defective pacemakers for implantation in humans
c. erroneously predicted a flood, causing a riot
d. failed to predict an earthquake


Bonus: Do cell phones cause brain cancer?
a. obviously
b. obviously not
c. I don't know, but I'd sure like to read about it!

Answers are in the comments.

Hello, 911? My Phone Is Killing Me!

With the announcement last week from a UN working group that cell phones might cause cancer, there has been a lot of buzz. Headlines in response to the news have included "Top 10 Low-Radiation Cell Phones," "Cell Phones Deemed Dangerous, Radiation Leads to Cancer" and the seemingly helpful "How Far Should You Sleep from Your Cell Phone?" (The question is, disappointingly, not answered in the article.)

I've written before about cell phones and the persistent fear that they damage your brain. The subject isn't a new one. But it's come up again because there was a meeting last month of a World Health Organization working group called the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). After reviewing the current research, including the results of a study called Interphone, the group announced that they were classifying cell phones as "possibly carcinogenic to humans."

To be clear, the conclusion of that Interphone study was the following: "Overall, no increase in risk of [brain cancer] was observed with use of mobile phones."

But the authors do report "suggestions" that one type of brain tumor was more common among the group of people who reported spending the most hours on their cell phones. They point out, though, that there are problems with this finding.

The study relied on subjects' own recollections of how much time they spent on the phone--over a ten-year period. That would be enough of a challenge for a healthy person to recall, but brain tumor patients can have added problems with cognition and memory. And the greatest impediment to getting accurate results in a study like this is the question itself: Excuse me, brain tumor patient, but might you have used your cell phone a lot before you got that brain tumor? Surely every cancer patient is eager to find an explanation for his or her disease. The authors acknowledge that, in a previous study, brain cancer patients were more prone to overestimate their time on the phone.

So why is the IARC taking this result seriously?

To answer that, let's look at how serious this new classification actually is. The IARC classifies chemicals and other agents under a 5-category system: Carcinogenic to humans, probably carcinogenic, possibly carcinogenic, not classifiable, and "probably not" carcinogenic. Of the 941 agents they've assessed, 266 are in the same "possibly carcinogenic" category as cell phones will be. It means that research has been done on the subject, and the possibility of cancer has not been definitively ruled out. But while it's pretty easy to show that, say, tobacco causes lung cancer or solar radiation causes skin cancer, it's very, very hard to show definitively that something does not cause cancer. In fact, out of those 941 agents, only 1 is listed as "probably not carcinogenic." It's a chemical called caprolactam. Go ahead, let your kids roll around in it. It's safe. Probably.

Other agents in the "possibly carcinogenic" category, by the way, include pickled vegetables, magnetic fields, and being a carpenter.

So it's technically possible that your cell phone, or almost any other object or substance in your environment, is giving you cancer. But in the case of cell phones, there's no known way that they could cause cancer. All radiation is not the same. High-energy UV rays, for example, knock electrons off of atoms and damage your DNA, which can cause problems when your cells multiply, which can lead to cancerous growths. But cell phones emit low-energy, "non-ionizing" radio waves. Science knows of no way that this type of radiation could cause cancer.

If you still want to go back to your landline phone, go ahead. Just try not to worry too much. That could kill you.

Why You Shouldn't Sing in a Pakistani Library

How uptight is your home country? In a new study in Science magazine, researchers posed this question to almost 7,000 people from 33 nations. They found that the answer was tied to factors ranging from population density and the availability of clean water to church attendance and the death penalty.

The researchers, led by Michele Gelfand at the University of Maryland, define a spectrum called "tightness-looseness." A nation that's "tight" is restrictive, with strong social norms and "a low tolerance of deviant behavior." But in a "loose" country, anything goes. To figure out where various countries sit on this spectrum, the authors used a survey. Subjects responded to statements such as, "In this country, if someone acts in an inappropriate way, others will strongly disapprove" and "In this country, there are very clear expectations for how people should act in most situations."

The subjects' answers were compiled to create tightness scores for their 33 countries. Especially loose countries included Brazil, Ukraine, and the Netherlands. Some of the tightest countries were Pakistan, Malaysia, and India. The United States scored medium-low: less uptight than the UK, but not quite as relaxed as Australia.

But the authors were after more than a simple international report card of prudery. They wanted to know whether a country's tightness could be tied to historical and ecological factors. Do countries become restrictive after repeated struggles with disease, hunger, warfare, or natural disasters? When populations must band together to survive, do countries have a greater need for rules and structure?

The answer appears to be yes. The authors looked at many environmental and historical factors (and adjusted for countries' per-capita gross national product, since many of these factors are also tied to the wealth of a country). They found strong correlations between a country's restrictiveness and its food deprivation, lack of safe water, vulnerability to natural disasters, tuberculosis infection rate, and childhood mortality.

A country's tightness or looseness manifests in the actions of its government, as well as its populace. The authors found that tight countries' governments tend to be autocratic, with restrictions on the media and civil liberties. Tight countries are much more likely to still use the death penalty. People in tight countries tend not to attend public demonstrations or sign petitions, but they do attend church regularly.

The study's subjects were also asked about day-to-day situations. They rated the restrictiveness of different settings: Can you act however you like while walking down the sidewalk? What about at work or at the doctor's office? They also rated the appropriateness of various behaviors in these settings: Is it OK to eat in an elevator? What about on a bus? Should you flirt at a funeral? (Is this OK anywhere?) You can see more settings and situations, plus the historical and environmental factors studied, here.

A person's culture will shape his or her psychology, for obvious reasons. Someone who lives in Jerusalem and sees buses blowing up on a regular basis must have a pretty different worldview from a sheep farmer in New Zealand. To study the mindsets of people in tight and loose nations, the authors also gave their subjects psychological surveys. They found that people living in restrictive countries restrict themselves, too: They are more cautious and more dutiful, they prefer structure in their lives, and they have better impulse control.

The study does not give a comprehensive picture of all 33 nations, since samples usually came from one city or region in each country. But it offers a snapshot of lives and attitudes across the world. The authors hope that their work can help promote understanding and cooperation between cultures.

Aside from being fodder for a decently entertaining guidebook ("Chapter 9: Funerals Not to Flirt At"), this sort of information could help governments to handle sensitive negotiations. Or it might help aid workers to put locals at ease. The study is a reminder that people in different countries don't just have different views out their windows; they have deeply different perspectives, too.

Cephalopods Not in Space

After 15 days in orbit, the crew of the space shuttle Endeavour will be returning to solid ground tomorrow. Their mission has been notable for several reasons: It's the second-to-last NASA space shuttle mission ever, and the last trip Endeavour will take before heading to its retirement home in a Los Angeles museum. The commander of the mission is Mark Kelly, husband of almost-assassinated Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. The shuttle's crew successfully delivered the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), an extremely expensive piece of particle physics equipment, to the International Space Station.

And, of course, there are some squid on board. I wrote earlier about Squids in Space, a project to study whether friendly, glowing bacteria that live inside squid behave badly in a low-gravity environment.

I also asked you all to go to YouTube and vote for a question I'd submitted for the PBS News Hour's "You Talk to Endeavour" interview. There were more than 1,800 questions submitted by the public. My question was about the future: What will it mean to be an astronaut in 25 years or so, when today's teen space fanatics have joined the space program? I was hoping to use the answer in my magazine, and I got enough votes to stay near the top of the pack (thank you!). The interview took place on May 19. Hi, astronauts!

I think being in space gives people a slightly jolly appearance, since their cheeks float up into their faces a little bit.

Sadly, PBS science correspondent Miles O'Brien--yes, like the Star Trek character--didn't include my question in his interview with the Endeavour crew. But he did have a nice conversation with the astronauts about the Mississippi River (they could see the floodwaters), Gabby Giffords (she watched the launch), and personal trinkets the astronauts take into space. 

He also asked the astronauts to do a group somersault. Judging by the speed with which they complied--the question was barely out of O'Brien's mouth before Mark Kelly went heels-over-head--I suspect they've practiced.

They may as well live it up now. Gravity returns tomorrow, along with the reality of the shuttle fleet's retirement. But the science experiments the crew helped with will carry on without them, including the AMS's cosmic-ray measuring and whatever happened to those squid. As for NASA, we'll see where it heads next.

Images: Google/PBS NewsHour/YouTube

Keep Your Enemies Closer

If smallpox were still around today, no one would have parties to infect their children, like they do with chickenpox. Smallpox was no joke. The disease used to infect 50 million people a year, and as many as one in three infected people died. Most survivors were scarred with pockmarks, and some were left blind.

Of course, no one gets smallpox today. It's the only infectious disease of humans that we've successfully eradicated. The World Health Organization (WHO) began a serious vaccination campaign against smallpox in 1967 (though vaccination had been possible since around 1800), and in just a decade the disease had been wiped out. The last naturally occurring case of smallpox struck in 1977. Then laboratories set out to destroy their remaining stocks of the virus. By 1984, smallpox had been erased from everywhere on Earth except for two labs--the Centers for Disease Control in the United States, and another site in Russia--that had been designated by the WHO as the disease's last refuges.

Now that we've consigned our longtime killer to custody, do we keep it indefinitely for observation? Or execute it?

The United States and Russia want to keep it for research. A contingent of mostly developing nations, led by Iran, wants the virus destroyed completely. These countries fear that in the event of an accidental--or deliberate--release, they would be most vulnerable. But American and Russian scientists say there's still more to be learned from keeping smallpox around, and that further research could help protect us if the disease somehow does return in the future.

Kathleen Sebelius, the U.S. secretary of health and human services, published an op-ed in the New York Times last month insisting that we should delay destroying our virus stocks. "We fully agree that these samples should--and eventually will--be destroyed," she said. "Although keeping the samples may carry a minuscule risk...the dangers of destroying them now are far greater." Sebelius was working against a deadline: a meeting of the World Health Assembly this month in Geneva, at which the fate of the virus would be reconsidered.

At the meeting, the United States and Russia asked to be allowed to keep the virus for five more years. They were met with strong opposition from the group of developing nations, though Canada, Australia, and the EU supported keeping the virus. Finally, a compromise (proposed by ever-neutral Switzerland) was reached: smallpox will survive for now, and the issue will be reconsidered in 2014.

It may seem foolhardy to hold on to such a deadly weapon. But there are many good reasons to keep smallpox around. Although vaccines exists, better vaccines could be created. Current vaccines can't be taken by individuals with HIV, for example. When smallpox was last prevalent, HIV didn't exist yet. But if smallpox were to reappear now, large numbers of people in Africa couldn't be vaccinated.

Additionally, there's no proof that these stocks of smallpox are really the last ones in the world. And as Sebelius points out, the virus's genome is freely available online. Someone with advanced equipment (or perhaps, in future years and as synthetic biology technology advances, average equipment) could hypothetically create the virus from scratch.

So destroying the American and Russian viruses wouldn't guarantee that the virus never reappears--only that we couldn't study it any further. The issue may have eerie echoes of a nuclear arms race, but this race is really between us and one of nature's worst weapons.

Our Killing Cousins

If you're feeling any guilt about belonging to the one species that encroaches on other animals' habitats, hunts them for sport, and drives them to extinction, consider this: we're not alone. There's another species capable of hunting its neighbor to near annihilation. Of course, it's our closest relative.

Chimpanzees eat mostly fruit and other plant matter. They were believed to be complete vegetarians until Jane Goodall first witnessed a chimpanzee hunt in the 1960s. An organized hunting party may chase a young monkey through the treetops, some chimpanzees blocking its escape routes while others wait in ambush. Meat is not only a nutritional resource for a chimpanzee community, but a social and political tool.

One of chimps' favorite animals to prey on is the red colobus monkey. And a new paper says that in Uganda's Kibale National Park, chimps are taking more than their fair share of monkeys. The red colobus population has declined sharply over the past few decades, and if they don't rebound soon, they could be wiped out entirely.

Previous studies had suggested that the red colobus monkey population in the park was declining, and that chimps might be to blame. So an international group of researchers set out to settle the question. They gathered data in the park for nine years, then added it to data from several previous studies to produce almost 33 years' worth of observations.

Rather than trying to find and count every primate in the forest, researchers took a kind of cross-section by walking along a predetermined route and recording what monkeys and apes they crossed paths with.

What they found was quite pronounced: between 1975 and 2007, the population of red colobus monkeys decreased by 89%. Their decline was tied to a significant, though less dramatic, increase in the chimpanzee population. The researchers ruled out various other explanations for the apparent red colobus loss, including disease, lack of food, shyness around strolling scientists, and being eaten by eagles. Habitat loss and poaching, the usual human-based causes of species loss, were ruled out by the national park's protections. The chimpanzees, with their suspiciously expanding population, were the only remaining culprits.

This is the first time scientists have observed one species eating another species into a serious population slump. Usually, non-human species are forced to maintain a balance with one another. But the chimps at Kibale are managing an eerily human overuse of resources.

Of further concern is the fact that both species are already endangered, thanks to humans. The red colobus population might not be so fragile if we hadn't driven its numbers down to begin with. Or perhaps overhunting is a new chimpanzee behavior, an adaptation that would have appeared without our interference. Either way, now that one endangered species is threatening the survival of another, can conservationists afford to stay out of the animals' business?

The authors of the study think there's hope for the red colobus in Uganda, because their population's plummeting seemed to slow or stop near the end of the study period. Observations by other scientists suggest that the monkeys in the park have dramatically expanded their ranges since the 1970s; that is, individual monkeys seem to roam over a much wider area of land than they used to. This may be their attempt to avoid hunting chimpanzees. If it works, the monkeys will have saved their species from not one, but two primate threats.


Images: Thomas Lersch/Wikimedia Commons, Olivier Lejade/Wikimedia Commons

Shine for the Camera!

Images of the earth at night may strike you as beautiful (if you're someone with a penchant for satellite photos) or distressing (if you're concerned about the effect of light pollution on migrating animals and/or you're a sea turtle). Some economists look at these photos and see tools for gathering data about other countries.

Previous research has found that luminosity--how much light a geographic area gives off at night--is a kind of shorthand for that area's economic productivity. Countries with a higher GDP (gross domestic product) have more stores that stay open at night, more cars on the road, and more electric lights guiding their citizens. More light means more business.

A new study by Yale economists Xi Chen and William Nordhaus asks just how useful this shorthand is. Can we use satellite photos to estimate the GDP of countries that don't collect or give out economic data? Haiti is one such country, lacking the resources for things like census collection. (You can see the clear dividing line in luminosity between Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the picture below. Puerto Rico is the well-lit island all the way to the east.)

The researchers used satellite images taken between 1992 and 2008. One benefit of these data is that they consist of very high-resolution images, even though the satellites that took the pictures were actually studying cloud cover.

Looking both at entire countries and at smaller regions within countries, the authors created detailed measurements of luminosity and compared them to economic data. They found that looking at nighttime lights was, in fact, useful--under certain circumstances.

For countries that already provide plenty of economic data, luminosity doesn't add much to our understanding. And for countries with extremely low luminosity, there's not enough data to go on. But in general, for countries that don't share much information with us, nighttime lights can serve as a consistent proxy for economic productivity.

(North Korea, a country that certainly doesn't share much information with the outside world, is on the west side of the picture. It's the almost shockingly black space below China and above South Korea. Japan, all the way on the east, is bustling and bright.)

The study is a neat example of how much can be learned just by looking. It also demonstrates how resourceful researchers can use already-existing data sets to generate new information. When economists can use pictures from a cloud-measuring satellite to gather GDP data about other countries--instead of starting a new research project--it means we can save a bit of our own GDP for something else. 

UPDATE: In the comments, Shelby asked about those swirling lights between Korea and Japan. They didn't seem to be related to shipping, since the lights don't follow direct paths. I took a quick spin around the globe on Google Earth and didn't find the same light patterns anywhere else. But an internet search turned up the answer: squid fishing (the link is a PDF), which is an especially large industry in Japan. Fishermen work at night and use powerful lights to attract the squid. It all comes back to inkfish!

Images: Google Earth