Naked Science Q&A

Korean researchers claim to have discovered two sound-sensitive genes in rice plants...

Mi-Jeong Jeong and colleagues from the National Institute of Agricultural Biotechnology in Suwon, South Korea, made the discovery by exposing plants to noise and studying how this affected gene activity.

Initially they tried playing 14 samples of classical music to their rice, including Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, but saw no response. 

Next they tried playing sounds of specific frequencies and began to see a change.  At 125 Hz and 250 Hz the activity of two genes, rbcS and Ald, went up. But when sounds at at 50 Hz were played, the gene activity went down. 

To find out whether other genes could be rendered sound-sensitive, the team linked the genetic elements that control the Ald gene to a 'reporter' gene inserted into the rice called GUS (beta-glucuronidase).  They found that sounds could then also manipulate the levels of GUS.

This suggests that it might be possible to use sound instead of chemicals to control different genetic processes in plants, such as switching on resistance genes to help them fight off pests or ripen more rapidly. 

Not all scientists are convinced though; some say that the new research, which is published in the journal Molecular Breeding, makes use of old techniques and lacks sufficient numbers to make the data credible. Sounds like sour grapes, although it does suggest that it's not just cereals like wheat and barley that have 'ears'...

A green-glowing chemical from a jellyfish can be used as a molecular thermometer...

Known as GFP - green fluorescent protein - the substance is used by biologists to harmlessly label cells. Shining light of a certain wavelength at a cell containing GFP causes the molecule to flash up green.

But a closer look at the green light given out reveals that it is not continuous and instead rapidly blinks on and off as the molecule subtly alters its structure. 

Now, Cecile Fradin and her colleagues from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario Canada, have found that the rate of blinking corresponds to the temperature - when things get hotter the blinking slows down, whilst at cooler temperatures the blinking speeds up.

To find out whether this could be used as a miniature optical thermometer the team measured the blink rate at different temperatures between 10 and 50 degrees C.

Writing in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, they found that with this technique they could make measurements to within an accuracy of 1 degree.

Previously, researchers had tried to use dyes which glow more brightly at different temperatures, but these can be misleading if several molecules congregate together producing a brighter light. The new discovery is likely to prove useful for temperature monitoring applications on miniature lab-on-a-chip diagnostic devices, and even for measuring the temperature of different structures inside living cells.

Dave: I think it probably is. When water turns from a liquid into a gas, it needs lots and lots of energy, that’s why if you sweat on a windy day you cool down because the water evaporated off your skin which absorbs lots of energy and cools you down. Essentially that is what the wet towel is doing. It’s evaporating so that absorbing lots of energy, cooling everything down. Ideally you wants it to by slightly windy, you probably don’t want too much sun on the outside as it will be heating it up. Unless, the sun heating it up is causing air currents, it’s making its own winds because it gets hot and air expands so it floats upwards.

Chris: I did try this when I was in Boston, It was so hot and I was in this room, and they said they would let me borrow a fan from reception for $5 so I took this fan up to my room. I then though all this is doing is blowing hot air from outside into my room, and making it hotter. So I thought I’d apply a bit of physics. I went and got a towel, dunked it in the sink, making it really wet and draped it over the fan. For a while it worked beautifully. The cold air coming through was evaporating water off of the towel, bringing down the temperature of the air going through and cooling my room down! That is until the fan blew up and filled the room with smoke because it had gotten water in it!

Big businesses are notorious for being difficult to get through to, especially if you cannot read and write and the company happens to be cutting down the forest in which you live. Well, now technology has come to the rescue with what has been nicknamed Pygmy FM. Here is Mike Hopkin.

Michael Hopkin: For thousands of years, there have been Benjelle Pygmies who have lived a hunter gatherer lifestyle in heart of the northern Congo. Unfortunately for them, their home is slapped bang in the middle of one of the world's richest sources of prime hardwood and these semi-nomadic people are forced to share the forest with international logging companies. For years, the Benjelle have accepted logging as a fact of life without much means to air their grievances with CIB, the company that holds extensive logging rights in the Republic of Congo, the pygmies have been unable to tell the loggers which trees they would like to see left alone, but now with consumers demanding more sustainably harvested timber, CIB has realized that its profits are at stake. So, it has enlisted the help of development groups to set up a community radio station that aims to allow the Benjelle to speak up. I asked Scott Poynton of the Tropical Forest Trust, charity that promotes responsible forest management about the need to put the Benjelle on the air waves.

Scott Poynton: Part of the problem was the pygmy communities living in that area, well throughout central Africa really is that they are semi-nomadic. Today, they can be in one place and tomorrow they will be somewhere else. They are also non literate. You know, you cannot send them a letter. They do not have a letterbox that you can contact them through and also they are an egalitarian society so they do not have a village head. So, you cannot just go and talk to one person. So, it was actually Jerome Lewis's idea and Jerome and I been working with these pygmy communities for many years. Jerome had the idea of establishing a radio station, by which using, you know, robust wind up radio technology that we could have some broadcasts made by the communities themselves whereby they can communicate with the company and the company can create its own broadcast and thereby establishing a dialogue, not a direct dialogue, anyhow sort of two-way dialogue, but a dialogue nonetheless where ideas can be exchanged and the thoughts of the communities can be put on air and that can reach the company.

Michael Hopkin: The radio station at first perhaps inevitably nicknamed Pigmy FM has now been formally named "Bisso na Bisso," which means "between us" in the local Lingala language. A few pilot shows have already been made and in the traditional community radio style, feature mix of debate and music, but the pygmies still need a way to tell CIB exactly which trees they particularly value and this is where the project gets really clever. With the help of anthropologist Jerome Lewis of the London School of Economics, who has lived on and off with Benjelle for years, the project's organizers have created special handheld computer consoles for the pygmies to carry while roaming through the forest. The devices use GPS to log automatically the locations of important trees and sites. That way CIB, which has always practiced selective logging can avoid these precious specific resources.

Jerome Lewis: They put together a series of icons and have a decision tree whereby the pygmy communities can go into the forest and that is a very easy technology. It takes about five minutes to explain what it is all about and the pygmies are pretty smart people. They know what is going on. They have never seen a computer before, but they can work out what this technology is aiming to do and I have advised it because they can guide into the forest and say, 'look here is a sacred area so they can click on the icon that shows the sacred area and then they can click on the reason why it needs to be protected. It is a sacred area for the women or is it sacred area for traditional festivals, and in some cases they do not actually go down to that far because some of that knowledge is in fact confidential and sacred and they do not share, but in other cases they say 'look, here is an area we just need to protect it because we need to protect it' or 'here is an area where we gather food' or 'here is our watering hole' and so through that process they have been able to map large areas of forest that they use. These maps are then produced. They go to the company. They say, 'hey, look these are the areas we would really appreciate you to keep your bulldozers out of them, please do not fell these trees for example because in the dry season we harvest the caterpillars from those trees'. It is an important food product. And so what has happened is there is a dialogue being started through this handheld.

Michael Hopkin: The radio station will also benefit the pygmies in other ways. It will give them better access to information about doctor visits, vaccinations, and AIDS awareness.

Jerome Lewis: Everyone can make their own programs and put out their stories, their concerns and their music. We can make sure that information about the visits of the doctor are kind of getting out, because in the past for example the doctor would go out to make a vaccination program for the children, but half the children would be in the forest, you know, for one reason or another and so, there are issues like that but if we can sound radio, hey look, you know, at the second moon or whatever the doctor will be at this place, then the chances of helping these communities and the kids out there to get their vaccinations is going to be much stronger.

Michael Hopkin: The project's organizers have already started using the mapping technology in other neighbouring countries in the Congo basin, particularly the vast Democratic Republic of Congo to the East. It looks like the pygmies of the Congo are finally finding their voice. (Voice in Lingala language)

Chris Smith: It sounds like they are certainly on the right wavelength with that particular approach.

Batteries can heat up if you have a short circuit. Instead of the electricity going through a circuit where it is used up in various ways or resisted, it just goes straight through the battery, and is then conducted back around into the battery again. All of the energy from the battery is released as heat in the battery, and it can get dangerously hot.

Urine will contain lots of things that plants like such as water and nitrates, which can act like fertilizers. But if you wee in the same place too much, you will build up a concentration of salts in the soil, and this can affect osmosis of water into the plant's roots. Salts also accumulate in the plant's leaves, potentially causing leaves to drop off, which can compromise the plant...

This is called the rhesus effect. The rhesus gene adds an extra 'label' to the surface of your red blood cells, like the labels for group A or group B, this is type D. If you are rhesus negative as a mother, it means you will not have any antibodies to this label in your blood, as your immune system has never seen it. If your partner is rhesus positive there is a chance that a baby you conceive will be rhesus positive too.When the baby is born, blood from the baby can get into the mother's blood stream, and so the mother makes antibodies against the baby's blood. This wont harm the baby this time round, but may cause complications during the next pregancy.Mothers protect their baby from 30 weeks by putting a cross section of their antibodies into the baby's circulation. This will now include the "anti-D" antibodies, so if the baby is rhesus positive these antibodies will lock onto their blood cells and start to destroy them. This can mean the baby becomes anaemic inside the womb, and so you either need to induce birth quickly or give the baby a blood transfusion inside the uterus. To prevent this happening in the first place, rhesus negative women are given a dose of Anti-D antibodies, up to 72 hours after her first baby if they couldn't determine the baby's blood type. The anti-D antibodies soak up any of the baby's blood so that the mother's immune system doesn't know how to make these antibodies.

Non-ionising radiation is not as dangerous as ionising radiation. Ionising radiation is the sort of radiation that we know does damage to cells like x-rays, gamma rays and beta rays which can cause damage to the DNA in your cells and cause cancer. Ionising radiation is so called because it produces ions by interacting with the atoms in your cells.Non-ionising radiation doesn't have enough energy to do this, so it doesn't damage your cells in the same way and is generally regarded as relatively safe. An example of non-ionising radiation is, in fact, visible light.

Heart disease is when the arteries of the heart become blocked. If you have a heart attack then the arteries have become so blocked that some of your heart muscle becomes starved of blood and can die. At the moment we have no way to re-grow heart tissue, although muscle stem cells show promise.There are ways to clear the blockage and open up the arteries again. One way is to open the chest and perform a bypass operation, where a bit of vein from somewhere else in the body, usually the saphenous vein from the leg, is grafted on as a bridge to allow blood to flow around the blockage. The newer way to do this, and much less invasive, is to thread a line up through the femoral artery in the leg and into the heart. Using a scanner to see where you are, you put a wire inside the coronal artery and blow up a baloon which squashes the blockage out of the way. You can then prop the artery open using a metal cage called a stent. New stents are available which resease drugs to stop further blockage of the artery.

The Apophis asteroid is due to fly past the earth in 2029, and there is some speculation that it could come back and collide with the Earth later. A company in Stevenage have announced that they would like to build a spacecraft to go and rendezvous with the asteroid to discover more about it. By flying up to meet the asteroid we can find out far more that we can from Earth, and if we find out early enough about it's projected course we have time to try and knock it out of the way! Should you build a shelter, probably not, but you've got 30 years in which to do it!