TALK ABOUT VARIETY! I CONFESS that many of the articles in AAAS Science pass miles over my head. (I won’t bore you with my life-long biological naivete; it’s beyond storks and babies, but not dramatically so.) Anyway, I still scan each weekly Science, especially for tidbits of what I hope are of general interest.
A Bit of Kim Reynold’s Humor. Back when Kim was Assistant Engineering Editor, he’d find a AAAS Science on my desk and say something along the lines of “Oh, no! Science beat us again, this time with the ‘White-nose pathogen evades bat skin defenses.’ There goes our newsstand, lame with yet another exclusive mid-engine Corvette.”
In fact, this month’s cover story is deeply biological, but elsewhere within I find tidbits galore.
Can ‘Cow Flu’ be Eliminated—Or Is It Too Late? Jon Cohen reports, “More than 3 months after the first reported H5N1 avian influenza outbreak at a U.S. dairy farm, some researchers are starting to wonder whether the virus is here to stay. The U.S. government says it, with the help of the dairy industry, is working diligently to prevent that outcome.”
However, Cohen continues, “But given the lack of cooperation from the industry and what many see as a lackluster government response, other scientists are doubtful.”
“Few H5N1 genome sequences are available from farms and milk processing plants. Instead, David O’Connor’s lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison is pulling viral sequences from milk bought at grocery stores.” Image and caption from Science.
As an example, with reporting by Kai Kupferschmidt, “Microbiologist David O’Connor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison has found a workaround for another bottleneck: the dearth of genetic sequences from the virus, which makes it hard for evolutionary biologists to detect the emergence of new variants or mutations that could ease spread in humans. O’Connor developed a technique that allows his team to pull entire viral sequences from milk bought at stores and has made four of them public to date.”
“But O’Connor is only fishing in milk cartons for viral sequences because so few are available from the primary source: farms and processing plants. ‘Whatever time we have, we’re squandering that by not acting more aggressively,’ O’Connor says. ‘It seems like we’re staring at the Titanic and the iceberg, and we’re just waiting to see if the ship turns at the last minute. That’s not a great strategy.”
See also “Bird Flu—Yet Another Challenge for Humanity?” here at SimanaitisSays.
State OKs Great Lakes Barrier. A native Clevelander, I have affinity for the Great Lakes. This News item reports, “A complex system of barriers to keep invasive carp out of the Great Lakes could start construction as early as next year, after Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker signed on to the $1.15 billion project last week. The Brandon Road Interbasin Project will establish a series of deterrents, including a curtain of air bubbles, sound barriers, and an electric array to deliver shocks, aimed at stopping Asian carp from traveling along the Des Plaines River at a pinch point near Joliet, Illinois.”
A silver carp, one of several carp species native to China and invasive to the U.S. Image by Dezidor from Wikipedia.
“The carp have been gradually moving up from the Mississippi River toward Lake Michigan, and scientists predict that if they make it to the lakes, the fish will outcompete native species and unalterably change the ecosystem. The federal government previously allocated funds for the project, but the agreement required both Illinois and Michigan to share in the construction costs before the effort moved forward.”
It sounds like the countermeasures—air-bubble curtains, sound barriers, and an electric array—could give MAGAs new ideas for “controlling vermin.”
Plague Felled Ancient Europeans: “A mysterious crash in the European population about 5000 years ago was likely caused by the plague, according to a paper published in Nature this week. Researchers sampled ancient DNA from the teeth of more than 100 skeletons from monumental tombs in southern Sweden around the time of the so-called Neolithic decline, and found the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis in almost 20% of burials over six generations. Most infections clustered in the last two generations, suggesting a particularly deadly outbreak. Scientists had previously proposed plague as a driver of the population decline, which opened the way for migrants from the steppe, but this is the first direct evidence of an outbreak.”
“Migrants from the steppe,” eh? Gee, I need a break from all this MAGA carp er… crap. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024