The last 3 days I've come down with some horrific rhinitis which I suspect, after a life time of it, is non-allergic. This is going to be a post on its own but everything is backlogged since I've been lying around wishing I was dead for the last 72 hours. Almost fully recovered now!

Monday: Three-eyed rave-... er, beetle

Medical science has come a long way, but there's always a demand for greater understanding. The growing need for artificial organs is pushing a whole line of medical careers intimately researching how to safely mimic real organs and get away with transplanting foreign objects.

What better way to do that than grow a functional third eye on to a beetle! Amirite?

Hear me out.

Last year, a study on the development of insect heads accidentally created a third eye on a bug - a pair of compound eyes fused together. Building on that, scientists sought to grow an understanding of how evolutionary development occurs. Eyes, for example, are not a result of a single gene, but thousands working together. De-mystifying the complex building blocks would be a large step towards seeing how evolution recycles existing genes in a novel way.

This has been shown in fruit flies by growing eyes using existing genes, but on their wings or legs, called ectopic organs, but they never really worked. This one is different. It's fully functional. After last year's study, they found orthodenticle to be a gene responsible for insect head development, and simply deactivated that one gene and hey presto, the insect's developmental system starts re-arranging things, fusing eyes together in the middle of its head!

This knowledge can potentially help manipulate complex organs with simple genetic manipulation techniques available to all, and overall grow a greater understanding of how complex organs organize themselves, all of which could help reparation and transplantation, well, who knows. Maybe it's just a cool monster bug.

You can read more here (paywall)

Tuesday: Graphene super-sieves

Ahh, graphene. The wonder material that's said to be more flexible than plastic, stronger than steel, and stable even barely an atom thick. Its applications are seemingly endless.

Well, it turns out it can also serve as a pretty good sieve. That sounds trivial, but it could become a much more efficient water filtration system than anything we currently have, given that in its graphene-oxide state, it is completely impermeable to all solvents - like salt - , except by water molecules.

In places where fresh water is scarce, this could be a big deal. But just recently, something even better has been worked on; manipulating the graphene-oxide to filter out specific solvents.

To demonstrate this, the researchers took to whiskey. It's a hard life being a genius, I know. By designing a super-thin membranous slate of graphene, they managed to pour whiskey through it, alcohol and all, except the larger molecules - still barely a nanometer across - that create whiskey's distinct amber hue. The result was a perfectly clear whiskey!

Again this has more applications. Because it can be manipulable and highly stable, it not only can be a more efficient water filtration device, but also useful for separation of various solvents in pharmaceuticals and other chemical industries.

You can read more here

Wednesday:Bee's unexpected nemesis

Bees are in decline, most of us get that by now. But figuring out exactly why, how and how fast are yet to be set in stone, and so a solution is slow to arrive. We need bees, guys!

Well, some researchers looked at 2 dozen factors that could be causing bumblebee decline, expecting things like humans taking up land, humans using insecticides and humans in general. What they discovered was rather unexpected.

Fungicides, which were thought to have no effect, could unfortunately be working in synergy with insecticides, making them extra toxic to the bees. The fungicide Chlorothalonil has been connected with both stunted colony growth and increasing a bee's weakness to a deadly gut infection called Nosema.

In fact there's a direct correlation between the presence of fungicide and the appearance of nosema & thus bee decline.

Hopefully this will lead to a new solution, a safer fungicide, or something! Even from a financial point, bees are worth hundreds of billions of dollars as pollinators. Gotta act fast.

You can read more here

Thursday: Bacterial arms race

On the other end of the extinction scale, bacteria always seem to be a step ahead of us, hence the massive, global hysteria about the very real superbug crisis we're about to encroach upon.

But not to worry! Scientists have, well, not solved that issue as such, but gained some more understanding as to how exactly the bacteria evolve to resist all these antibiotics.

Sequencing the entire genomes of the bacterium's DNA via a novel technique, the researchers found two mechanisms bacteria have been using to bypass our efforts to annihilate them, both essentially blocking the path of the antibiotic into the DNA or RNA of the bacteria.

In one case, the bacterial ribosomes (a protein synthesizer) deactivates and the bacteria goes into a kind of hibernation, which vastly increases resistance. Understanding this further could allow a new generation of antibiotics that bacteria can't (yet) adapt to. So the world isn't going to end just yet, I suppose.

You can read more here

Friday: Banana resistance

Back to mass extinction, bananas have had a lot of trouble historically simply trying to survive. The history is fascinating and worthy of its own post but basically, disease spreads and since all the Gros Michel bananas we ate were clones of each other, none of them ever evolve resistance to deadly things and were swiftly wiped out.

Well the cavendish banana we all know and love after that previous eradication of n the 50's, has been in trouble for some years now due to a new strain of the same villain; the ominously named 'TR-4' pathogen, or Panama disease.

But, clever people took a gene from a TR-4 resistant wild subspecies of banana, the Musa acuminata and plonked it into the Cavendish, and success was observed. One line of cavendish were completely TR-4 free, despite being in TR-4 polluted soil, and three others showed high resistance.

This is seriously great news, because I love bananas. I can't imagine a world without them. I'd rather inject myself with TR-4. That stuff can stay in soil for 40 years and can destroy entire plantations single-fungidly.

The gene responsible for the resistance - RGA2 - is actually in the cavendish, but it's not too active, so the next step is to try and activate that gene, along with finding useful resistances to other diseases. As I said, all the bananas you eat are basically clones of each other, so they're pretty vulnerable to infection and disease, so the more research to save this beautiful fruit, the happier I am!

You can read more here

Well, that's it for this week!

All images CC0 licensed