Some galaxy somewhere

After a brief hiatus, BunsenBwog is back, bringing you the best science happenings at Columbia. This week, Bwog’s resident stargazer Zach Kagan discovers that when you stare into a black hole, it stares back into you.

While Columbians have been bogged down with hurricanes, blizzards and midterms, NASA’s plucky  NuSTAR X-ray telescope has been enjoying clear skies in orbit 550 km above Earth’s surface. BunsenBwog has been keeping close tabs on NuSTAR because A) it’s awesome and B) Columbia Engineers are responsible for the device that allows the telescope to focus and amplify X-rays as they are collected. Now NuSTAR has been directed at the center of our galaxy, to observe the massive black hole in the center of the Milky Way. To be more accurate, it’s aimed at Sagittarius A*, a very compact radio-source that is thought to be a black hole.

However, Sgr A* doesn’t act like black holes in neighboring galaxies, which have a habit of gobbling up whatever star or gas cloud passes too close to their event horizon. That cosmic consumption results in temperatures of over 100,000 million degrees Celsius and massive emissions of radiation, but scientists haven’t seen the same behavior from Sgr A*. Then again, there’s been no way to directly measure the X-rays created during such events, until now. NuSTAR is already  collecting X-ray data from Sgr A*  which will allow astrophysicists to learn more about the eating habits of black holes. According to Columbia’s Professor Chuck Hailey, ”astronomers have long speculated that the black hole’s snacking should produce copious hard X-rays, but NuSTAR is the first telescope with sufficient sensitivity to actually detect them.” Your sleeping and smoking habits after the jump

Carbon footprint

Bwog’s resident carbon confidant, Zach Kagan, brings us sordid tales of sustainability, statistics, and snacks.

This midterm season, an incalculable number of sodas and assorted caffeinated beverages will be drunk. Scores of candy bar pick-me-ups will be scoffed. Bag after bag of vending machine purchased chips will be opened and consumed. Exams and snacking go hand and hand this time of the semester, but as you cram for your sustainable development midterm, you may pause and wonder about the sustainability of your own increasingly junk food fueled diet. As it happens, PepsiCo wondered the exact same thing and, thanks to engineering professor Christoph Meinrenken, they know quite a bit more about it.

But PepsiCo didn’t just want to analyze one product. It wanted to determine the carbon footprint of each of its 10,000+ products, not an easy task. Determining the footprint of something requires so-called “life-cycle assessment,” following the product on each stage of its development from bare materials to consumption. Each step of production has its own set of emission factors that needs to be accounted for. Each requires a different team of experts to analyze and compute the footprint. That data needs to then be used to create a meaningful description of the carbon footprint of an individual product. To repeat that process for each of PepsiCo’s products would take an exorbitant amount of time, money, and patience. Prof. Meinrenken sensed that this problem could be solved much more efficiently, but to do so he would have to think outside the box.

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This week on BunsenBwog, our double feature puts the Homeric dichotomy of city of peace and city of war to shame. Zach Kagan brings you the stories of how the Nobel prize relates to sweet-toothed Swedes and the legitimacy of North Korean nuclear tests.

Oh the irony

This week Columbia celebrates the addition of CC and College of Physicians and Surgeons alum Robert Lefkowitz to its list of 95+ “Columbia affiliates” who have been awarded a Nobel prize. Lefkowitz won this year’s Chemistry Nobel for his work with Brian K. Kobilka on G-protein coupled receptors (or GPCRs). His original interest was studying the mechanisms that control heart contractions. Knowing that certain hormones such as adrenaline can increase heart rate, Lefkowitz and Kobilka set out to characterize the so-called beta-adrenergic receptors responsible for reacting to such hormones. The researchers were able to clone these receptors and in doing so, they created new avenues to study GPCRs in general. Their result proved influential in pharmaceuticals as well, where it led to the development of groundbreaking cardiovascular medications.

Columbia continues to hold the world record for number of Nobel laureates, that is counting all current and former alumni, faculty, and mathematical geniuses who choose to work as university janitors. What gives Columbia an edge over runner-ups such as University of Chicago or Cambridge? According to Columbia Prof. Franz H. Messerli, the answer might lie in the amount of chocolate consumption. Messerli ranked countries by number of Nobel laureates per capita, and then cross referenced that list with the average amount of chocolate consumption per person in that country.

The result turned out to be a “close, significant linear correlation between chocolate consumption per capita and the number of Nobel laureates per 10 million persons.” Messerli’s regression line suggested that it requires about 0.4 kg of chocolate per capita per year in order to produce an extra Nobel laureate. There was only one major outlier: Sweden. The Scandinavian nation that awards the Nobel prizes also seems to win several of them, without a suitably high level of chocolate consumption to match. Messerli provided the following explanation: “the Swedes are particularly sensitive to chocolate, and even minuscule amounts greatly enhance their cognition.” Read about dangerous explosions, or the lack thereof, after the jump

He’s cured three diseases before you even woke up this morning.

Bwog’s avant-garde epidemiologist, Zach Kagan, ventures out on this fine Sunday armed with sleep inertia and a healthy sense of adventure. He discusses recent development in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) with our very own Professor Lipkin.

Professor W. Ian Lipkin has been featured in several editions of BunsenBwog, and why wouldn’t he be? As the director of the Center for Infection and Immunity and John Snow Professor of Epidemiology at the Mailman School, Prof. Lipkin has metaphorical fingers in so many metaphorical pies that he ought to get metaphorical carpal tunnel. BunsenBwog has covered his work on the Borna Disease Virus, Kawasaki Disease, and the film, Contagion, where he acted as a creative consultant (and provided inspiration for one of the characters). But these are but tiny portions of the research Dr. Lipkin contributes to at the CII. That is why I was so excited when Prof. Lipkin agreed to speak with me about the CII’s latest findings on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

The first thing you learn about W. Ian Lipkin is that he’s extremely and perpetually busy, making it difficult to find a time to actually sit down and talk. After a week of negotiations with his personal assistant, Prof. Lipkin decided to E-mail me himself. At 6 A.M. on a Sunday. “Best for me would be 9am.”

What’s more destructive than an alphavirus? A T-Rex loose in NY.

We already know what science would do with a 65-million year mosquito sample: make a dinosaur theme park and hire Jeff Golblum to get chased around by velociraptors. But what does science do with a thirty year old mosquito sample? Make a theme park based on hair-rock, Rubik’s cubes, and massive shoulder pads? Unfortunately for the nostalgic among us, science is too socially minded to burden the world with a resurgence of parachute pants and John Hughes movies. Instead they’ve made a key step towards eliminating mosquito-borne viruses, which is marginally cooler than the 80′s, I guess…

The sample in questions was originally found in the Negev Desert of Israel by Hebrew University’s Joseph Peleg. Afterwards, it was shipped around the world, just one in a collection of over 5,000 other mosquito samples, until it was tested by a University of Texas professor named Robert Tesh and his graduate student Farooq Nasar. Nasar discovered that whatever virus the mosquito was carrying, it wouldn’t infect vertebrate cells. From there the virus sample was sent to a lab at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health where a team of grad students got to “deep sequencing” the virus’ DNA. In other words, resequencing nucleotides over and over again to eliminate errors.

The Columbia team found that there were actually two viruses present, one that attacked insect cells and another, which they termed the Eilat Virus, that merely infected them. The second one is what the team was interested in, but they never would have detected it if it weren’t for its more careless roommate going around killing cells and, presumably, being a general slob. Eilat cannot infect or reproduce in animal cells, which is curious enough, but it turns out from the deep sequencing results that Eilat is a member of the alphavirus family. Alphaviruses are a bunch of mosquito-borne miscreants that cause all sorts of diseases in domesticated animals and humans such as “chikungunya, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, western equine encephalitis and eastern equine encephalitis.”

That makes Eilat the Casper the Friendly Ghost of viruses. While all of Eilat’s big brothers go out and infect animals, Eilat just stays in mosquito cells and tries not to be too much of a bother. But Eilat is going to show them. Researchers are using the virus to create vaccines for other alphaviruses. All they have to do is to create a modified version of Eilat with an encasing similar to a dangerous alphavirus, but with Eilat’s chill attitude intact. Thanks Eilat, you a bro. *fist bump*
Read more of BunsenBwog here

Real life Donkey Kong

This week, our aspiring anthropologist, Zach Kagan, trekked down to 112th and Broadway to talk with climate scientist Benjamin Cook about his research on the real Mayan apocalypse, not the one purported to happen on December 21st, 2012.

Climate science tends to obsess with the far future. What will climate patterns be like in five, ten, fifty years from now? Will there be enough clean water for our grandchildren? Can we impede the rate of climate change or should we all just get used to the taste of nutritious Soylent Green?

While these questions are important, others like Columbia/NASA researcher Benjamin Cook and his collaborators are looking for answers from the past. Not the geologic past either, but specifically 1,300 years ago: the collapse of the Mayan civilization. The Classic Maya collapse has troubled generations of historians and archeologists. Why was it that, after centuries of expansion and increasing sophistication from 300 AD to 900 AD, the Mayans declined so rapidly? Cities were abandoned and people fragmented into smaller groups mainly along southern Mexico and Guatemala. There are dozens upon dozens of theories for this collapse, ranging from hostile invasions to revolts to disease. However, the most accepted one has recently been the drought theory.

The idea is that the Mayans suffered from a prolonged period of intense drought lasting for 200 years. Though it might not be as exciting as the climatic battle for Chichén Itzá, but water is crucial for producing food that sustains a society. After all, a society can only function as long as it produces enough food for everyone to eat, even if some people are rulers, priests, or merchants instead of farmers. A structured and heavily stratified society like the Mayans needed a large food surplus to exist. No water means no food surplus, which means no Mayan civilization. Evidence collected from tree rings, cave formations, and lakebeds seems to support this theory.

What’s the catch? Read more after the jump.

Each week, amateur astronomer Zach Kagan watches the skies for signs of SCIENCE. We present here this week’s findings—a special offering that highlights the search for dark matter.

Dark Matter is a term that’s thrown around a lot when people talk about unsolved mysteries in astrophysics. You’ve probably heard about the stuff, but you may not know what it is, which is fine because neither do the astrophysicists. The problem is that galaxies don’t rotate the way that they should. We predicted that outer stars should move much slower than inner cluster stars. However, they tend to move at similar velocities on the galaxy’s edge. That isn’t possible according to our understanding of gravity, so an explanation was developed: there must be much more mass in the galaxy than is observed. Much much more. Around 20 times more. And all that mass, which drives the rotation of outer stars, must completely be non-visible.

So what was this stuff? Two theories emerged. The first supposed that all this dark matter was made up of large, dim objects like black holes, rogue planets, and dense neutron stars. These objects were collectively called MACHOs (Massively Compact Halo Objects). The second theory supposed that dark matter was made up of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, or WIMPs because scientists have a sense of humor too. Over time, as experiments found negative results for MACHOs, WIMPs became the popular theory for the nature of dark matter, even though no one was sure what WIMPs were anyway.

But WIMPs are elusive, as Columbia astrophysics professor Elena Aprile has found. Prof. Aprile led a team of scientists at Italy’s Gran Sasso laboratory on a 13 month search for the most promising WIMP candidates. The Columbia team built a sophisticated device called the XENON100, which uses ultra dense liquid Xenon to sense rare collisions with the faint WIMP particles. The device is brought deep—roughly 5,000 feet—underground in a chamber lined with copper and lead to filter out the hailstorm of particles we normally experience on the surface (such as cosmic and background radiation). However Aprile’s team didn’t find anything, not even after 225 full days of data gathering by XENON100.

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Not that important after all

Each week Bwog’s resident Cell Scrutinizer, Zach Kagan, takes the top science news and breaks it down for the rest of us. This week, it’s less launching rockets and cloning dinosaurs and more of the heavy stuff. 

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are common urban pollutants responsible for myriad health issues. Children of mothers exposed to higher levels of PAHs tend to have lower IQs and are more likely to suffer from mental health problems such as anxiety and depression. In addition, Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health has found that women exposed to these pollutants during pregnancy have twice the likelihood of having obese children. The study focused on 702 non-smoking pregnant women of African American or Dominican decent in Manhattan and the Bronx who wore small backpacks that sampled the air around them. This is the first study to suggest that environmental chemicals may have a role in the increasing rates of childhood obesity in America. There is hope, however: another team of Mailman School researchers found that the US could reach its childhood obesity goals by cutting out just 64 calories a day, on average. This is because the energy gap between calories consumed and calories used by the body often very slight, but overtime can lead to significant weight gain. This means that with subtle tweaks to children’s diets and activities (less juice, more outdoor playtime), parents can overcome the gap and have a healthier child.

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More controversial that you'd think

Grab your lab coats and slap on your safety goggles, because the world of science is in turmoil. Sort of. This week Zealous Xenobiologist Zach Kagan brings you exciting tales of global warming, stem cells, the secrets of the the brain and more.

Last Wednesday Havemeyer Hall became a battleground over the future direction of Neuroscience research. In a public debate, moderated by Robert Kulwhich of Radiolab fame, two top neuroscientists argued over the direction of future research: In one corner we have Sebastian Seung, MIT professor of computational neuroscience and swanky dresser, and in the other corner we have the one-and-only director of the Center for Neural Science at NYU, Tony Movshon. Seung came into the ring swinging, arguing the the ways that neurons interconnect throughout the brain is the most important avenue for research. Movshon fought back, standing firm in his belief that scientists should specialize in which area of the brain they study, getting deeper into how each individual part functions. In the end both combatants went the whole fifteen without a knock out, but it was a hell of a show.

We need more Dilithium, Capt'n!

Bwog’s resident Particle Pontificator again rounds up all the top science stories for the week and breaks them down for the rest of us.

Fortunately for those who prefer to not be spontaniously annihilated, the universe is overwhelmingly made out of matter and virtually no antimatter. But why? An international collaboration of physicists have used powerful supercomputers to calculate the decay process of a kaon particle into two pions. The mechanism of the kaon’s decay is important because it could shed light on the phenomenon of CP symmetry violations. This describes how the interactions of particles and anti-particles differ in such a way that more matter is created than antimater.

Romans and Carthaginians, Capulets and Montagues, pigs and angry-birds—some of history’s greatest rivalries. No feud, however, is as great as that between biologists and engineers. Yet sometimes people can put down their differences and work together towards a common goal. Columbia professor Dimitris Anastassiou started his career as an engineer, but after being inspired by a textbook (The Biology of Cancer) by MIT professor Robert Weinberg, he defied fate and traded his soldering gun for a micropipet. Now he’s used his engineering training to expand on Weinberg’s research. His latest study examines patients whose cancer took longer to recur.  He found that these patients have a lower amount of a protein signature that indicates cancer cells that act like stems cells. This supports Weinberg’s theory that these stem cells are what drive cancer growth.

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SciFi Standby

Bunsenbwogger Zach Kagan returns to share the progress made last week in the wide world of science.

BunsenBwog has previously reported on Columbia Engineering’s attempt to bring CSI technology into reality. Prof. Ken Shepard and his team have been doing this by sequencing DNA by dragging single strands though nanopores. The problem, however, has always been measuring the minute electrical signals that are emitted as the molecule passes though. Previous optical methods used florescent molecules and a wavelength filter, but it takes time for the the photons to be emitted and the signal to be taken, like exposing a photograph. This may only take 10 milliseconds, but with the the number of molecules in a DNA sequence it can add up. The Shepard group’s innovation is designing an integrated circuit and building the nanopore device around a “patch clamp amplifier chip.” This allows for clean measurements mostly free from background electrical noise, able to measure a DNA molecule in a sigle microsecond!

Looks like it’s a week of science callbacks! A month ago researchers at the Columbia University Medical Center published a paper suggesting that Alzheimer’s disease is caused by deformed tau proteins that propagate from neuron to neuron, deforming more proteins along the way. Now our colleagues at Cornell’s medical college have taken Columbia’s findings and used them to create a computer program that models the spread of the abnormal protein across the brain. So far, MRI scans of patient’s brains support the Cornell model, which may allow doctors to design targeted treatments for the brain’s most susceptible areas.

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This guy knows why it gets so hot

This week, our Erlenmeyer Expert, Zach Kagan gives Bwog the scoop on water flotation to staph infections and most importantly why it’s really geting so hot in here. 

While you were sleeping all day last week, Columbia scientists were taking measurements—big measurements. Researchers at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory assisted in NASA’s Operation Icebridge Arctic (a project to record changes in polar ice) by measuring water depth under floating ice using gravimeters. And if all that ice melts? Well, Columbia climate scientist Maureen Raymo has you covered. She’s the lead author of a new paper that says that during Earth’s past extremely warm period, 400,000 years ago, water levels only rose 20 to 43 feet higher than they are today. That’s up to a third less than what has been previously predicted using older models. And, it’s encouraging news—as long as you aren’t one of the 17 million who live in low lying Bangladesh, an area that would be flooded by an ocean leave rise of just 5 feet.

A potential breakthrough in Type 1 diabetes research: Dr. Chutima Talchai and Dr. Domenico Accili from the Columbia Medical Center have discovered that gut cells can be “coaxed” into producing insulin. Working with diabetic mice, the team inhibited the Foxo1 gene, a gene that determines the future role of progenitor cells. In the gastrointestinal tract these cells can develop to produce a wide range of important hormones, but with the Foxo1 gene switched off insulin was also produced. Not only that, these cells have glucose recepters that signal the cell to produce insulin when needed. The location in the gut is promising too since the diabetes may not be able to destroy insulin producing cells outside of the pancreas. If the process is repeatable in humans and demonstrably safe, it may save diabetics the pain of self-injecting insulin.

A new study collaborating with Columbia University Medical Center has discovered a new strain of staph (the Staphylococcus aureus bacteria) that transmits much more easily between humans. Normally, staph infections occur when people interact with swine but human to human infections are very rare. This new strain has adapted to thrive in humans, developing ways to adhere to human skin and it’s own set of “human specific immune invasion genes.” But where did they discover this new strain? Why, upper Manhattan of course! Wash your hands regularly, Columbians.

Read more BunsenBwog updates after the jump.

Not just a girl's best friend

It’s Saturday, which means Chemical Charmer Zach Kagan has once again mixed a week’s worth of science news together in an erlenmeyer flask for your edification. 

A landmark study from the Earth Institue suggests that ocean acidity is rising faster than any time in the history of the planet. Open water absorbs CO2 emissions, where it becomes carbonic acid. Normally that acid gets neutralized by sedimentary materials like fossilized plakton, but the quantity of CO2 is so overwhelming that all the carbonized plakton shells have dissolved away, leaving a layer of mud. There’s only one other record of the ocean floor transforming into an underwater swamp of sadness, 300 million years ago—and even that happened over a 5,000 year span. Meanwhile, ocean pH is falling at an unprecedented rate, which the scientists expect will lead to a major decrease in marine diversity.

In other weird nature news, a new collaborative study says that global warming also causes increased snowfall. Columbia researchers expanded on data which suggests that changes in atmospheric circulation and atmospheric water vapor content cause snowier winters, both of which are in turn caused by melting arctic ice. So the globe may be getting hotter, but at least it’s increasing the odds of getting a snow day.
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