Awesome AACR video: "it's our time"

Cancer Carnival #33

It's that time of the month again: Cancer Research Blog Carnival time! Kicking things off, we have some research blogging from the Mad Lab Rat about mathematical modelling of cancer virotherapy.

Which was why the first thing that struck me when a certain jazz-playing poetry-writing philosopher-doctor sent this paper my way was that it was involved in developing a mathematical model for treatments. Not to replace animal testing, obviously, but to cut the tests down to those that were more likely to work, reducing the need for animal use.

The paper is exploring glioma virotherapy, which uses synthetic viral capsules to target cancer cells and kill them, while not harming the surrounding normal cells.

The paper models a variety of factors, including immune response and the effects of immunosuppressants and their effects on oncolytic virus propagation.

What does the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull have to do with cancer? The Thoughtful Animal explores a link between volcanic ash, intelligence and cancer

Put most simply, a teratogen is something in the environment that messes with a developing fetus. Specifically, teratogens are environmental agents that are relatively harmless to an adult, but that can result in birth defects and developmental disorders of varying severity in the child.

He does note that health-wise there isn't much to worry about with this particular eruption.

Over at Aetiology, there are a couple of student guest posts exploring causes of various cancers. First, a look at existing data examining a link between alcohol-based mouthwash and oral cancer. A second post explains how common gut bacteria may be involved in development of colon cancer. On the subject of colon cancer, Healthcare Hacks briefly discusses some research describing the health effects of fruit skin pigments (specifically anthocyanins) - colon cancer and obesity effects in particular.

In a bit of a change of pace, Life, Death, Cancer is a thoughtful post about the emotional experience of participating in a cancer race and the effectiveness of those types of fundraising efforts.

Finally, if you're interested in pretty data presentations (read: infographics), The Web Nurse has a collection of 25 such infographics related to smoking.

That's it for this month's Cancer Research Blog Carnival. For older editions, visit the Carnival Homepage. Don't forget, the CRBC has subscription options; you can follow by email or RSS feed. An aggregated feed of credible, rotating health and medicine blog carnivals is also available. For a broader collection of science-related blog carnivals, sign up for the Science, Medicine, Environment and Nature Blog Carnival Twitter Feed

Rats eating high-fructose corn syrup get obese.

This is actually a bit old and covered by many others in a more timely manner. The title says it all. Research on rats at Princeton University indicates that high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) get fatter than rats fed equivalent calories of other sweeteners. HFCS is the sweetener of choice in North America and is in many different foods, including many you don't think of. One that surprised me was mayonnaise.
This is probably the punchline of the article for lawyers:

"Our findings lend support to the theory that the excessive consumption of high-fructose corn syrup found in many beverages may be an important factor in the obesity epidemic," [emphasis mine]

We still drink too much soda, its not the fault of companies that sell it that we are all fat. (I use the term soda because it is what many Americans, the fattest nation on earth, call pop). I don't have access to the full article at this time and don't understand how it was established that the HFCS consumption was excessive.

In case you think that the pictures in the article of test tubes full of orange soda are strange, as I did initially, let me point you to the relevant quote in one picture caption:

"The concentration of sugar in the sucrose solution was the same as is found in some commercial soft drinks, while the high-fructose corn syrup solution was half as concentrated as most sodas, including the orange soft drink shown here."

Rats don't prefer orange crush over Coca-Cola, that is a ridiculous notion. The picture was taken by someone who watches CSI and likes science eye candy and really, it's the people that matter anyways.

Of Alcohol and Intelligence

Over at Gene Expression, Razib Khan has done a quick analysis of alcohol consumption demographics. In one chart, he shows a correlation between alcohol consumption and vocabulary. As a dipsomaniac and sot, this comes as no surprise. He writes:

I was expecting it. That is, that the more intelligent, who scored high on a vocabulary test, would drink more than the dumb, who scored low. Look at the other correlates above. But I’ve rarely seen such a stark near-monotonic trend with Wordsum.

I mean, just look at Hemingway. But Razib also warns about findings like these:

Anyway, just be careful of studies extolling the virtues of alcohol unless they control for confounds. It’s just a fact that stupid people tend to die earlier, because they often make life decisions in keeping with their nature.

Haldane and Hybrid Bears

Haldane's* Rule:

When in the offspring of two different animal races one sex is absent, rare, or sterile, that sex is the heterozygous (heterogametic) sex.

This rule is almost universally true (see table**) and is supported by the observations that among hybrids such as ligers, zonkeys and mules the males (XY) are all sterile while females (XX) may be fertile (though often poorly so, due to mismatched chromosome numbers, discussed briefly here). The reverse observation - sterile females - is true in species where the male is the homogametic sex such as birds and butterflies. Hypotheses explaining the genetic basis of Haldane's Rule and its challenges are explained nicely here.

Recently, a new fertile hybrid was discovered. The grizzly-polar bear hybrid has been seen before, as discussed here, and with changing habitats and more grizzly-polar bear encounters we'll likely see more. The Toronto Star is reporting the first offspring of a hybrid bear.

Researchers in the Northwest Territories say they may have found the first recorded offspring of a hybrid female polar-grizzly bear in the wild. [...] Officials with the territorial government say those test showed that the dead bear was the offspring of another hybrid bear — a female polar-grizzly mix who had mated with a male grizzly.

Given Haldane's Rule, that the hybrid parent was female isn't surprising, but it remains to be seen whether the males are sterile or if this becomes the first mammalian exception.

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*In addition to being one of the founders of population genetics, Haldane also wrote poetry about rectal cancer, a disease he succumbed to in 1964.

**Table source: Nature 355, 511-515 (1992). Ref. 41 refers to Coyne, J.A. and Orr, H.A. in Speciation and its Consequences (eds Ott, D. and Endler, J.) 180-207 (Sinauer, Sunderland, Massachusetts. 1989)

Stem Cell Blogging

I've just started a new gig writing for the Stem Cell Network, where I'm part of a team of bloggers writing about stem cell news, research and related topics. My first post is up now:

In Britain, a young boy is currently recovering from a remarkable surgery to replace his windpipe. Tissue transplantation itself is hardly a routine thing, but there are a couple of things that make this case, reported in the British Medical Journal, particularly interesting.

Read more

The Glucose Song

Something silly for Sunday... (but who doesn't love The Archies?)



[via Dr. Isis]

But you still take it orally...

A friend recently pointed me to this article in the Globe and Mail [Robitussin: Pregnancy in a $5 bottle of hope]. Apparently, couples having trouble conceiving are turning to the cough medicine Robitussin. And not just because nobody wants a partner with a wet, hacking cough. (Though I'm not up to date on the latest fetishes). The premise is simple: Robitussin contains guaifenesin which thins mucus. Women report that it also works on cervical mucus which facilitates the passage of sperm.

Unfortunately, while the theory makes sense there is little in the way of scientific study to back it up. The first report in the literature was in 1982 (described in the G&M article), and there is a single case study since then that involved guaifenesin use.

Not unexpectedly, that means most of the claims about guaifenesin and pregnancy remain in the realm of anecdote across message boards and in pregnancy books. Also unsurprisingly, many of the comments on the Globe and Mail piece blame the lack of study on Big Pharma conspiracy keeping down a cheap alternative to IVF. The original article is worth a read for a more balanced perspective.

Cancer Carnival: May 7

The Cancer Research Blog Carnival will appear here in a week's time. That's one more week to write something new on the topic of cancer research, or send us something cancer related from the past month. Submissions can be made on this form or emailed to us directly.

BBQ Season!

Grills have been firing up around the country since the snow melted, and often before. Sometimes, though, you might find yourself with a delicious steak but a shortage of propane, or no access to a BBQ. Over at Discoblog, you can find out how to cook your steak sous-vide without the need for a fancy or expensive machine - just some sealable bags and a beer cooler.

All you have to do is fill up your beer cooler with water a couple of degrees higher than the temperature you’d like to cook your food at (to account for temperature loss when you add cold food to it), seal your food in a simple plastic Ziplock bag, drop it in, and close your cooler until you food is cooked, writes Chef Kenzi on the blog Serious Eats. It’s really as simple as that.

Very simple and totally portable. Forget about beer-can chicken and try a sous-vide steak. The only obvious problem is this: With your cooler busy cooking meat, how is that beer staying cold?

Circus or Zoo?

There's been some buzz lately about Stephen Hawking's comments that alien life almost certainly exists, but we should be doing everything we can to avoid it.

[A] few life forms could be intelligent and pose a threat. Hawking believes that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity. [...] He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

This of course raises the age old question, for when our alien overlords arrive:



It seems slightly ironic that Hawking's warnings come at the same time that we celebrate the Hubble Telescope's 20th anniversary - a tool whose breath-taking pictures have undoubtedly inspired many people to wonder what, and who, else is out there.

I've been watching a lot of Doctor Who lately, catching up on the new series, and re-enjoying the old. It's impossible not to revel in his awe and joy and wonder as he travels space and time unravelling mysteries and encountering new species - in a universe he knows to be full of monsters and bad guys. In that spirit, I have to side with optimism and Ethan Siegel:

But what irks me most of all is the cowardice behind a viewpoint that we shouldn't rush to meet a peer in this Universe. It would be like forgetting the best part of being human: our bravery, our sense of adventure, our will to explore, our thirst for learning and discovery, our curiosity, and our desire to experience all that existence has to offer.

And if we're swept up and forced into an intergalactic zoo, circus or worse, at least I'll get to ride in a spaceship.

Cell Phones and Airplanes

If you've ever wondered about the the phone use ban on airplanes, there's more to it than just potential interference with instruments. While that is also a factor, and the FAA's (Federal Aviation Authority) main concern, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) has concerns that using cell phones at altitude could disrupt the towers themselves, possibly crashing the system or lowering network capacity.

If a mobile phone is operated from an aircraft in flight above a city, the towers of many different cells may be about equidistant from the phone. Multiple towers might assume that the phone is under their control."

This could cause problems with the tower software, interfere with other calls, or reduce the available network since the phone is now occupying the same channel on multiple towers instead of just one. Check out this infographic for more details.

24 carat gold test tubes

Perhaps a more inert material should be used for test tubes. As we've discussed before chemicals leaching from test tubes can lead to enzyme inhibition. It has also been demonstrated that plastics can interfere with results in cell culture and even more recently it has been shown that plastics can affect protein and DNA measurements by UV absorption measurements, by as much as 300%.

Eyjafjallajökull

The air routes are clearing up and now that I've finally mastered the spelling, if not the pronunciation, of Eyjafjallajökull I can actually blog about it. Not that I have much to say on the topic, so here are some pretty pictures (click them for larger versions):

From NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day, April 19

From The Daily Mail. Follow the link for other great pictures.

To learn more about that volcanic lightning, check out this post at Starts With a Bang.

parasitic wasp video

World Homeopathy Awareness Week

Right now, we're smack in the middle of World Homeopathy Awareness Week, which runs from April 10 - 16. As you can imagine, the science blogging community is taking the opportunity to raise awareness about the lack of evidence supporting homeopathy and the utter ridiculousness of its claims.

From Sandwalk:

Homeopathy Kills

Here's what can happen if a homeopath treats his own daughter. He ends up in jail, she ends up dead.

The "Science" Behind Homeopathy

Here's John Benneth explaining the "science" behind homeopathy. This is woo of the highest order. [...] There are no reputable scientists who believe what John Benneth claims. If he's implying that there's scientific support for homeopathy, then what he's saying is not true.

From Pharyngula:

More Magic DNA Snake Oil

Drink a DNA solution? Are they insane? That's just going to get broken down and do nothing, and besides, it's not as if your body contains some shortage of Klotho genes — every cell in your body has a copy. Of course, even that objection is pointless, because you aren't actually drinking any DNA. This is a homeopathic solution.

And of course Respectful Insolence has a couple of posts up in honour of the event: Part 1, Part 2. (There is some overlap with the above links as well)

A Guest Post

We received the following guest post from a friend of the Bayblab, looking for a bit more exposure for his own writing and blog, Health and Life. If you recognize the site, it's recently hosted the Cancer Research Blog Carnival twice.

Are the chemicals we’re putting into the environment causing disease?

Maybe. Almost certainly yes in that there are chemicals that are widely used today that cause toxic effects of some sort. To think otherwise would be hubristic. In the 1970s, for instance, we widely used the chemical DBCP only to learn that it can, at fairly low doses, make men sterile. Oops.

On an unrelated note, mens’ sperm counts may have halved over the past few decades. Instead of making 20 million sperm per ejaculation, the men of today make only 10 million. The exact numbers aren’t established science and there is the possibility for variation but that is fairly chilling.

The worst cases are blatant and perhaps not so bad because of that. When a factory in Japan dumps toxic sewage into its neighborhood, we shake our heads but don’t worry too much. After all, that doesn’t happen in America, right?

Even as we point at specific molecules as being toxic and completely unsafe reality is more perplexing. Mercury was present in some form in vaccines and advocates argued (although the science seems to be against them) that it was a cause of autism. Yet the new type of lightbulb, the fluorescent light bulb, happens to contain mercury which could be an issue if one breaks.

Things are rarely black and white. As science is able to discriminate with greater precision practices that seemed safe are revealed as dangerous. Levels of exposure to something that used to be OK can be revealed to cause birth defects in mice. Bisphenol A came out of nowhere but suddenly can cause a whole variety of toxic effects.

Still, certainly we are better off than those who came before us. After all, at least we don’t drink wine from lead cups as was a Roman practice.

The worst case scenario is that the environmental toxins and toxicants are gradually killing us in a subtle manner. Or that they are causing a rising epidemic of problems like ADHD, autism and male feminization or that they may be behind certain types of cancers.

The best case scenario? That environmental toxins and toxicants do cause damage and problems but our bodies are hardy. We can, and do, handle a great deal daily. Cells grow, cells die, possibly become cancerous, and are possibly removed by an immune response. Or not.

And it’s the or not that scares rational people.

David is a blogger who enjoys analyzing medications and health issues. You can see writing of his at Health and Life.

Limits

Just a quick reminder to the Bayblabbers to continue to listen to the radiolab podcast. The latest episode has a very interesting section near the end about scientific answers generated by computers that we can not grasp with our limited cognitive abilities. The impossibility of the human brain achieving genuine insight into complex biological systems is also briefly touched upon. Of course, as usual, the whole episode is great. mp3.
I find this stuff so interesting to think about as I really enjoy the theme of the impending artificial intelligence singularity in science fiction. (I know that one could argue this theme has been overdone in science fiction but perhaps that's because it's so plausible.) As an aside, I am finally becoming more interested in the spin-off of the Battlestar Galactica series, Caprica, which also explores these themes. (albeit using extremely lame looking robots)

Cancer Carnival #32

The 32nd edition of the Cancer Research Blog Carnival is now live at Health and Life. Go check it out - we've got ERVs, breast cancer genes and more! The next edition is still homeless, but will appear here or elsewhere on May 7. In the meantime, you can send your cancer-related posts using the form found here.

Kamel self-publishes first book!

We are pleased to announce that Bayblab's own blogger "Kamel", whose prose you may have encountered in the Open Laboratory editions of 2008 and 2009, is finally releasing his first self-published book. During two years of sweat and tears, like a hermit in a crypt, with 2 computers running at all times and only a couple of rats as company, Kamel has been toiling away on his debut book: "A Brief History of Dicks: Penile Self-Experimentation Through the Ages". Already, pre-release copies which were sent out to various ScienceBlog writers have been received with critical acclaim. PZ Myers had this to say: "irrelevant: despite the title this has nothing to do with wingnut conservatives", Greg Laden also published a full commentary of the book on his blog, but it was too long for me to get through it. We wish the best of luck to Kamel and we will soon be taking pre-orders for the book...