Science and Wonder

The Arctic is what Puget Sound once was

2008-09-09T16:22:00.000-07:00

These photos (below) are from a website run by NASA called Earth Observatory, which features satellite photos and pictures taken by astronauts from Earth orbit. They show how a warming Arctic is affecting glaciers. But, I also found these photos interesting because it helps me imagine and understand what happened in the Seattle area during the ice ages.

Puget Sound is also a fjord, and we all learn in grade school that it was carved by glaciers, and that the glaciers were once a mile thick above downtown Seattle. When those glaciers melted and retreated they left steep hillsides, lakes, and a deep watery trench.

Now, look at what happened this summer along Canada's Arctic coast. A block of glacial ice cracked, and the sea ice that held it in place melted. Then, the entire glacier floated away in mere days. In the top photo you see the glacier and ice just before the runaway melting. The bottom shows after. (For scale, this photo would cover an area nearly the size of western Washington state.)

The channels that look like rivers would be like the channels between Seattle or Tacoma and Kitsap.

Medical clinics where you shop

2008-08-26T10:50:00.000-07:00

Last week, I wrote a story about the mini-clinics inside grocery and drug stores. It included this paragraph:

“Most treatments are priced at 59 dollars. You’d be billed twice or three times as much at a traditional urgent-care clinic. MultiCare accepts insurance and Medicaid, so most people end up with just a co-payment either way. To break even, the mini-clinic needs to see at least 25 patients a day. That covers rent and the salary for the Nurse Practitioner who staffs it. The one-person staff keeps costs down – along with treating only minor ailments. Is this the next big trend? Not yet, despite hype from some chains. It’s been moderately successful in other parts of the country – but not a revolution.”

For Tacoma’s MultiCare health system, the key is integrating the retail clinic with their larger system. Many of the patients (including the two that I interviewed in the drugstore) were referred from MultiCare’s traditional urgent-care clinic, which was overcrowded.

The question I did not address, but hinted at, in the story is this: Are these retail clinics a good indicator of how much you pay for inefficient overhead during your basic medical appointment? We’ve been hearing for years how wasteful the medical system is, and how paperwork eats up a big share of every dollar. But this seems to be a graphic illustration, at least for all those visits that didn’t need fancy MRI machines and surgical suites nearby.

Microbes on the beach

2008-08-17T16:56:00.000-07:00

More on microbes. This time, it's the effort to understand the vast number of species that live all over our environment. Most of these (like 95%) can't be grown in the laboratory, so they haven't been studied much. For the past decade there's been a rush to use new DNA sequencing technologies to identify and learn about these bacteria. That's how we became aware of how little we know.

One effort along these lines is happening in my backyard, or not far from it. A group at the University of Washington is sampling mud from Lake Washington. They're developing ways to pinpoint species that live there, focusing on bacteria that subsist on methane and related compounds. If you're interested, you can read a summary from the press release, or visit the lab's website.

Spicy microbes

2008-08-12T16:27:00.000-07:00

Ecology is full of surprises. And often those surprises have to do with microbes. I'll write more about microbes in the coming months. I was lucky this week to be able to write about chili peppers and the strange ecology that allowed them to evolve spiciness.

Short version: Josh Tewksbury at the University of Washington, and a team of researchers, found that the spicy substance inside peppers acts as a defense against a fungus. That fungus destroys the seeds inside the peppers. (It turns them black and generally very gross looking.) In climate zones where the fungus grows more readily, the peppers evolved to be spicier. Specifically, they produce more capsaicin. The same chili species in drier zones is not spicy at all.

But what makes it not just interesting, but fascinating, is the three-way relationship between the chili plant, the fungus and a tiny insect. Without all three, the world would be full of bland food.

The insects, as Tewksbury describes them, have mouths shaped like drill bits. They drill into the chili fruit and into the seeds, and eat the nutritious inside of the seeds. They can do a lot of damage, but they don't destroy all the seeds. However, the holes they drill allow the fungus to get inside the waxy fruit surface and seed surface. By secreting a spicy substance around the seeds, the plant keeps the fungus at bay, just enough to keep the fruit and seeds looking healthy.

As long as the chili peppers look tasty, birds will eat them, as birds are not sensitive to spiciness. And birds are the main distributors of chili pepper seeds.

If you take any of the creatures out of the system, you don't get spicy habaneros or jalapenos or any of the other peppers we know and love. In fact, all spicy peppers, along with sweet peppers, evolved in the dry forests of Bolivia, Argentina and Paraguay. People bred many varieties from just a few core species. They spread around the world, including to India and Thailand, only post-Columbus.

Wow.

Medicine and shopping

2008-08-06T10:04:00.000-07:00

I've been watching the trend of drugstores (and supermarkets) adding mini-medical clinics inside their stores. It's an interesting idea, sort of an end-run around all the hassle of trying to get an appointment with your doctor and be seen in a timely manner. Instead, just walk into the nearest drugstore and have your minor ailment checked out. And, it's supposed to provide an option for people without insurance.

This started on the East Coast, and Bartell Drugs first tested it here in Washington a couple years ago, by contracting with a chain called Minute Clinics. Apparently, that didn't work out so well.

Now, Rite Aid is trying a new angle, at two of its stores in Tacoma. It's teaming up with a local health-care provider, in this case MultiCare Health System. MultiCare is huge in Tacoma, the dominant medical provider, with four hospitals, and a network of primary care and Urgent Care clinics. MultiCare is staffing the mini-clinics (with ARNP's -- Nurse Practitioners) as one more branch of its network.

According to a story in the Puget Sound Business Journal, these clinics do better (financially) when there's a shortage of primary care providers -- so, outside major cities. In Houston, they're converting the mini-clinics to telemedicine clinics, because it was too expensive to pay a nurse to sit there all day.

Will this ever be an important trend in medical care? Is it helpful to have a service like this? Or does it just seem like a new type of marketing?

How many people get HIV?

2008-08-05T12:12:00.000-07:00

If you heard my story this morning about HIV infection rates (“How many people get HIV?”), you might have wondered, What’s changed? Why are the estimates different from in the past?

The issue has to do with when people first became infected with HIV. Here’s the problem: Many people walk into a clinic and get diagnosed as HIV-positive long after they were first infected (a year later, or many years later). Therefore, the number of “newly diagnosed HIV cases this year” does not tell you how many people became infected this year.

Maria Courogen, of the Washington Department of Health, explained to me that a new, two-stage HIV test has been developed. The second stage can distinguish between a recent infection and an older infection. When you’re first infected, your body mounts a big immune response, and the number of antibodies spikes way up. After a few weeks, the antibodies begin to subside.

A federally-funded study took this two-stage test to 22 communities across the U.S. and compared how many people were newly-infected vs. infected earlier. They used this data to extrapolate and estimate the number of new infections per year.

It doesn’t change much. For most people, you won’t do anything differently whether there are 570 new cases or 700 new cases per year in Washington state. I think there are two reasons we sat up and paid attention. Because we haven’t heard any really new news about HIV in America And, since the new estimate is in fact an increase, it served as a reminder that the epidemic isn’t going away.

Living with 3 calendars.

2008-07-24T16:10:00.000-07:00

Since returning to KPLU, I’ve struggled with my computer and other electronic devices. The computer was replaced while I was gone, with a Windows XP machine. I have a newer computer at home, running Vista and new software. And I also have an older Palm device that keeps my calendar and contacts. It’s been such a chore to get these devices all to sync together. In the process, I’ve been playing with online calendars, such as Google Calendar and WindowsLive Calendar.

What do I want? I want to be able to view the same calendar on all these different devices, at these different locations. And if I add an appointment, whether from home, or from work, or while away from my desk, it should be added to all the synchronized calendars.

You might think either, (a) give it up, Keith, computers are never that simple; or (b) that’s simple, just use blah-blah-blah software.

I can tell you, as a fairly savvy user (but not a “power user”), this has been quite an odyssey. I finally stumbled on a solution that seems to work – kind of. First, I tried three different Microsoft applications, all of them aimed at synchronizing Outlook. But, ultimately, if you want Outlook Online to work for you, it appears you need to be running something called Microsoft Exchange at work, and my workplace is not. Eventually I found that Google Calendar has a “sync” option. (This is kind of hidden in Google – not easy to find. I discovered it through a Microsoft Office discussion forum, where one of the users had struggled with the same problem and mentioned the Google solution.)

It’s not perfect. In the process of synchronizing my calendar at work, it duplicated a whole bunch of appointments, and then triplicated them when I added the sync at home. That’s annoying, but not fatal.

Otherwise, I’m still new at using it, and I’ll update this later to describe how it’s working.

The spinal cord is smart (mapping the spinal cord).

2008-07-21T16:05:00.000-07:00

Last week, I went to the Allen Institute for Brain Science, in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, to hear about their latest project. They're creating a gene-expression map of the spinal cord (of a mouse – more on that later). Here’s a quick hit, from the story I produced for KPLU:

“… Medical researchers are looking for ways to repair damaged spinal cords, whether from a paralyzing injury, or a disease like Lou Gehrig’s. They’re getting help from a new approach involving genetics. Paul Allen’s Institute for Brain Science is combing through the spinal cord, cell by cell, to see which genes are active. Chief science officer Allan Jones says it’ll help researchers around the world work faster.”

This is hard-core science, not the kind of thing it’s easy to talk about at a barbeque.

But there’s an interesting side-bar story. The spinal cord is smarter than most people realize. It’s actually part of the brain, in the sense that it’s continuous with the part of the brain that extends down the back of your neck (called the brain stem), and it’s made of the same type of cells.

Why does this matter? When you prick your finger, or touch something hot, or step on a tack – anything that involves a reflexive recoil – your reflex is faster than your conscious awareness. That’s because there are neurons (just like the ones in your brain) in your spinal cord, and their job is to execute a reflex movement fast enough to save you from serious harm. That means faster than a message can travel from your finger, up your spine, into the processing areas of your brain, and then back down as a command to your muscles.

The neurons in your spinal cord make a calculation based on what your touch and heat sensing nerves detect. Sometimes, you might not like that reflexive move, and you might issue commands from your conscious brain to over-ride the reflex. (“This is going to hurt, so hold still until it passes.”)

The spinal cord map, from the Allen Institute, shows which genes are active in these neurons. It’ll be a helpful tool for researchers working on ways to heal a damaged or diseased spinal cord.

(They’re using a mouse spinal cord because it’s so much smaller than a human’s – 2,000 times smaller. The process of mapping involves cutting x-thick slices of the spinal cord and then analyzing each slice. So, “smaller” equals much “easier” and faster. Also, mice are still the premier lab animal, making such data useful for many lines of research.)

Introduction (About this journal)

2008-07-21T15:37:00.000-07:00

In this space I’ll talk about interesting advances in science and technology, often with a Seattle-centric slant. It’ll reflect my own personal strengths (and weaknesses), and my reporting for KPLU, but I’ll aim to make it far-ranging and useful to someone who isn’t necessarily tech savvy or scientifically inclined. Topics I’m especially interested in include: the evolution of life on Earth; brain science and the mind; personal technology that makes life easier; vaccines and global health; microbes; earthquakes and volcanoes; animal behavior.