- Email: [email protected]
Slowest drip gets a speed boost
Frans Lanting/FLPA
in Brief Supercool livers for transplant later
Melting ice puts emperor penguins on a slippery slope EMPEROR penguins may go into decline this century, as global warming melts the sea ice they rely on. But they might survive by moving to new breeding grounds. The world’s 600,000 emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri) live in 45 colonies around Antarctica. Only one colony, at Adélie Land, has been studied in detail. Hal Caswell at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and his colleagues used data from Adélie Land to predict what will happen to all emperors. They projected how global warming until 2100 will affect each colony’s sea ice. Too much ice forces the
birds to travel greater distances to the ocean to find food for their young, but too little means less krill, one of their main food sources, because sea ice is the krill’s habitat. By 2040 the retreating sea ice will cause all of the penguin colonies to shrink. The population may fall 19 per cent by 2100 (Nature Climate Change, doi.org/tgj). “If emperor penguin colonies were bank accounts, they would all be showing negative returns by the end of the century,” says Caswell. But if the penguins move to new homes, they have a better chance. And they do move, says Michelle LaRue at the University of Minnesota at St Paul. She tracked colonies using satellites and found six instances when the penguins didn’t return to the same location to breed. She also found a new colony on the Antarctic Peninsula.
Slowest drip gets a speed boost A CLEVER tweak is letting students “cheat” at one of the world’s longest running experiments. Although pitch – or bitumen – seems solid at room temperature, it flows like a liquid given enough time. To prove this, in 1930, a team at the University of Queensland, Australia, put some in a funnel. Since then, a drop of pitch has broken off and dropped just nine times. 14 | NewScientist | 5 July 2014
Kostya Trachenko at Queen Mary, University of London, wanted a pitch-drop experiment his students could see in action over the course of an academic year, letting them measure the fluid’s viscosity. So his team set up their own version last September, using a low-viscosity pitch. The group put the pitch in five containers with nozzles of various widths and let it drizzle into vessels
below. After 317 days, Trachenko’s students weighed the pitch that had fallen and calculated its viscosity, which was about 30 times lower than the Australian pitch (Physics Education, DOI: 10.1088/0031-9120/49/4/406). If cheating is not your thing, another little-known pitch drop experiment was rediscovered in 2013 at Aberystwyth University, UK. It was set up in 1914 but has budged just 6 millimetres in 100 years.
TALK about cool news. Once out of the body and stored on ice, the shelf life of a human liver is only about half a day. But that time could be extended if a supercooling technique can be scaled up to work in people. Bote Bruinsma at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and his colleagues have developed a preservation method in which two chemicals are pumped into the liver to stop ice crystals forming in the cells. This means the organ can be cooled to below 0 °C without freezing. To test the technique, the team gave 18 healthy rats a supercooled liver transplant. All the rats whose livers were preserved for three days before transplant were alive and well a month after transplant. But rats whose transplanted livers were preserved for three days using the traditional ice-cooling method did not survive (Nature Medicine, doi.org/tgp).
GM blood cells may dish out drugs RED blood cells could soon deliver drugs to where they are needed. Many drugs only last for hours in the blood before being broken down. A team at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Massachusetts wondered if drug-bearing red blood cells may be better as they live for months. To find out, the team took bone marrow from mice and isolated the precursors to red blood cells. They inserted a gene for a protein that sits on the cell surface and acts like a handle for other molecules to attach to. The team then attached an easy-to-track molecule to the cells. This showed that, when injected back into mice, the cells survived almost as long as normal (PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1409861111).
in Brief Supercool livers for transplant later
Melting ice puts emperor penguins on a slippery slope EMPEROR penguins may go into decline this century, as global warming melts the sea ice they rely on. But they might survive by moving to new breeding grounds. The world’s 600,000 emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri) live in 45 colonies around Antarctica. Only one colony, at Adélie Land, has been studied in detail. Hal Caswell at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and his colleagues used data from Adélie Land to predict what will happen to all emperors. They projected how global warming until 2100 will affect each colony’s sea ice. Too much ice forces the
birds to travel greater distances to the ocean to find food for their young, but too little means less krill, one of their main food sources, because sea ice is the krill’s habitat. By 2040 the retreating sea ice will cause all of the penguin colonies to shrink. The population may fall 19 per cent by 2100 (Nature Climate Change, doi.org/tgj). “If emperor penguin colonies were bank accounts, they would all be showing negative returns by the end of the century,” says Caswell. But if the penguins move to new homes, they have a better chance. And they do move, says Michelle LaRue at the University of Minnesota at St Paul. She tracked colonies using satellites and found six instances when the penguins didn’t return to the same location to breed. She also found a new colony on the Antarctic Peninsula.
Slowest drip gets a speed boost A CLEVER tweak is letting students “cheat” at one of the world’s longest running experiments. Although pitch – or bitumen – seems solid at room temperature, it flows like a liquid given enough time. To prove this, in 1930, a team at the University of Queensland, Australia, put some in a funnel. Since then, a drop of pitch has broken off and dropped just nine times. 14 | NewScientist | 5 July 2014
Kostya Trachenko at Queen Mary, University of London, wanted a pitch-drop experiment his students could see in action over the course of an academic year, letting them measure the fluid’s viscosity. So his team set up their own version last September, using a low-viscosity pitch. The group put the pitch in five containers with nozzles of various widths and let it drizzle into vessels
below. After 317 days, Trachenko’s students weighed the pitch that had fallen and calculated its viscosity, which was about 30 times lower than the Australian pitch (Physics Education, DOI: 10.1088/0031-9120/49/4/406). If cheating is not your thing, another little-known pitch drop experiment was rediscovered in 2013 at Aberystwyth University, UK. It was set up in 1914 but has budged just 6 millimetres in 100 years.
TALK about cool news. Once out of the body and stored on ice, the shelf life of a human liver is only about half a day. But that time could be extended if a supercooling technique can be scaled up to work in people. Bote Bruinsma at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and his colleagues have developed a preservation method in which two chemicals are pumped into the liver to stop ice crystals forming in the cells. This means the organ can be cooled to below 0 °C without freezing. To test the technique, the team gave 18 healthy rats a supercooled liver transplant. All the rats whose livers were preserved for three days before transplant were alive and well a month after transplant. But rats whose transplanted livers were preserved for three days using the traditional ice-cooling method did not survive (Nature Medicine, doi.org/tgp).
GM blood cells may dish out drugs RED blood cells could soon deliver drugs to where they are needed. Many drugs only last for hours in the blood before being broken down. A team at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Massachusetts wondered if drug-bearing red blood cells may be better as they live for months. To find out, the team took bone marrow from mice and isolated the precursors to red blood cells. They inserted a gene for a protein that sits on the cell surface and acts like a handle for other molecules to attach to. The team then attached an easy-to-track molecule to the cells. This showed that, when injected back into mice, the cells survived almost as long as normal (PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1409861111).