A cancer-free New Year

We’re always hearing about the things that may cause cancer — saccharin, cell phones, plastic water bottles — but what about those things that can help prevent it? Well, at the American Association for Cancer Research Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research Conference held earlier this month, researchers from around the world presented the most recent findings in the field of cancer, and many of them had good things to say.  Here’s a brief run down of some of the more unexpected items that may help protect our bodies against the dreaded disease:

– Hops: People are always arguing that a glass of red wine a day is good for you, but what about beer? Well, according to a group at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, a natural compound known as xanthohumol derived from hops blocks the tumor-promoting effects of testosterone — such as gene expression and cell growth — which can help prevent prostate cancer. And for the girls, xanthohumol also appears to block the action of estrogen, which may help protect against breast cancer. (Photo credit)

– Pistachios: A daily dose of pistachios may help reduce the risk of lung and other cancers, according to work done at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.  Apparently, pistachios are a good source of gamma-tocopherol, a form of vitamin E that is known to provide protection against certain forms of cancer, and eating 117 kernels a day resulted in significant increase in gamma-tocopherol in just a few weeks. (Photo credit)

– Coffee: The more coffee you drink, the more you reduce your risk of lethal or advanced prostate cancer. According to a study from the Harvard Medical School, men who drank the most coffee had as much as a 60 percent lower risk of aggressive prostate cancer than men who did not drink any coffee. As for which component of coffee might be the key factors in this protection, that is still up in the air. While caffeine did not appear to contribute greatly to the association, coffee does contain a variety of biologically active compounds like antioxidants and minerals that may participate. (Photo credit)

– Omega-3 fatty acids: Finally, long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, which are found primarily in fish and other seafoods, may help protect against colon cancer, according to research conducted at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina. The researchers found an inverse relationship between how much omega-3s one ate and the occurence of distal large bowel cancer. Added to the growing list of other omega-3 benefits, such as reduced tumor growth, suppression of angiogenesis and inhibition of metastasis, it’s seeming more and more like a fish a day may keep cancer at bay. (Photo credit)

I do have to throw in the disclaimer that despite all of this exciting research, it is still far too early to start trusting your health to pale ales, nuts, espresso, and salmon. But for me, I’ll take some of each this Christmas. Happy holidays everyone!

Awesome octopi

Animals and their clever ways never cease to amaze me. It’s part of the reason I started this blog in the first place. Today I was alerted to a BBC video of octopi carrying coconut half shelves to use as shelters. This is apparently the first example of tool use in this species, which surprises me slightly. The octopus is one of the smartest — maybe the smartest — invertebrates. To study them requires the completion of all the same regulatory measures as vertebrate work does, and octopi in captivity require mental stimulation, just like dogs or dolphins. (Playing with the octopus was one of the daily jobs I got to partake in during my time at the Tennessee Aquarium where I did much of my graduate work.)

In any case, this video has inspired me to start blogging again. My new job has kept me busy, with lots of writing, so I have been less motivated to work on my blog during the evenings and weekends. Kind of like how the last thing I wanted to do during my prelim exams was pick up a pleasure book. But my fascination with the animal world has not dwindled, and for those of you who do read my blog (thanks Mom!), I want to continue to share all the newly discovered animal stories with you. So check out this video, and check back soon for more tales of what, why, and how animals do what they do.

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Bat vs moth

Bats and moths are a classic predator and prey story, with lots of evolutionary twist and turns along the way. It has long been known that moths could detect the ultrasonic pulses that bats emit as part of their echolocation navigational system. Researchers have identified a variety of moth survival strategies, including their distinctive erratic flight patterns, which they employ when they hear an approaching predator. A Current Biology paper a couple of years ago even found that the yellow underwing moths can tune their ears to better hear the bats calls while being chased. It’s a constant evolutionary struggle for the bats to overcome these prey defenses to catch their daily full meals.

A new study, published in Science, identifies yet another innovative moth adaptation to avoiding bat predation: sonar jamming. Using a paired set of sound-producing organs known as tymballs, the moths can emit up to 450 ultrasonic clicks in a tenth of a second — a frequency that somehow disrupts the bat’s echolocation.

Whether or not this strategy helps the moths evade capture in the wild remains to be seen, but it certainly seems like it could buy them enough time to escape. What’s next in this evolutionary arms race?

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Canine cancer

When tragedy strikes a family, it’s often hard to “look on the bright side.” But when it comes to having your pet pooch — your best friend and loyal watchdog — diagnosed with cancer, learning what we can about the disease from the unfortunate circumstances may be of some comfort.

A recently launched cooperative effort — the National Cancer Institute’s Comparative Oncology Trials Consortium — aims to do just that. By providing the infrastructure and resources needed to gather information from naturally occurring cancers, such as in dogs and other animals (as opposed to the more removed mouse models of cancer), the project hopes to inform the study of human cancer and aid the development of new drugs, devices, and imaging techniques.

I don’t at all mean to imply that these potential benefits can even begin to outweigh the heartbreak that comes along with a loved pet succumbing to this terrible illness, but perhaps it’s something to keep in mind if that tragic news should ever come. Would you be willing to enroll your pet in an experimental cancer treatment that holds hope for both your pet’s health and the future of human oncology?

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Elecomm

We hear sounds waves that have traveled through the air or the water or a string in the case of a child’s homemade cup phone. But vibrations can also travel through the ground. While we, as humans, may not be able to perceive, nevermind interpret, these subtle vibrations, there is at least one species that can: elephants.

Indeed, elephants produce and ‘hear’ low frequency vocalizations (below what the human ear can perceive) that can travel very long distances through the ground. Dr. Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell of Stanford identified this so-called seismic communication when a group of elephants she was observing simultaneously paused during a midday stroll and pressed their front feet or trunks into the ground. This bizarre behavior turned out to be the pachyderm version of perking one’s ears.

Based on O’Connell-Rodwell’s experiments, it seems that elephants can not only perceive these seismic signals, but they can interpret them as well. One signal produced by the elephants, for example, appeared to warn of hunting lions in the area.

Elephants are believed to process these signals through mechanoreceptors known as Pacinian corpuscles found in their feet and their trunk. They also seem to be detecting the signal through their toenails, which transmits the vibrations through the bones of their legs and body all the way to the bones of the middle ear, which perceive the noise. This pathway is heightened when they close their middle ear canal, which allows pressure to build up in the middle ear and enhances the bone-conducted signal and shuts out any airborne noises.

Click here to hear a podcast of The American Physiological Society with O’Connell-Rodwell about her studies of elephant communication, or what Christine Guilfoy calls ‘elecomm.’

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Women can do math, too

The gender differences in mathematical ability aren’t due to some innate shortcoming of the analytical minds of women, but simple sexism. According to a new study published in PNAS, the disparity in the performance of men and women on mathematical tasks can be attributed to sociocultural factors.

The data compiled in this study revealed that in the US, girls’ math have caught up to boys’ in terms of standardized testing scores at the grade school level. And while males are more likely than females to score in the highest percentiles, suggesting potential gender differences among the mathematically talented, these differences are not ubiquitous across cultures. In fact, the greatest discrepancies in performance between the sexes correlated with measures of gender inequality, suggesting that it is simply the result of sociocultural factors.

But things are looking up for women in math. Women now comprise 30% of math PhDs in the US, up from only 5% in the 1950s. Watch out, boys!

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The Seahorse Master

A brief update on me:

Today I successfully defended my master’s thesis on the mate choice and courtship behavior of the lined seahorse (Hippocampus erectus).  I decided to take my master’s and leave school early in order to pursue my science writing career.  I have accepted a summer internship with The Scientist and will be writing for their website and monthly print publication starting May 4.  I would like to thank my committee and in particular my advisor, Mike Wade, for their generous support of this transition.

Worlds of perspective

Today I have nothing more than to share with you a surprisingly inspiring quote from a rather unusual source, Mites of Moths and Butterflies by Asher E. Treat:

The magic of the microscope is not that it makes little creatures larger, but that it makes a large one smaller. We are too big for our world. The microscope takes us down from our proud and lonely immensity and makes us, for a time, fellow citizens with the great majority of living things. It lets us share with them the strange and beautiful world where a meter amounts to a mile and yesterday was years ago.

I have always been fascinated by perspective – the way it shapes our beliefs and our behaviors and the way it can be so wickedly warped to reconcile our sometimes wayward motivations. But most of all, I am intrigued by the differences in physical perspective that sets us apart from the tiny creatures of the world that vastly outnumber us giants. I remember writing stories as a child from the viewpoint of an ant in the kitchen looking for its next meal (I’m pretty sure I stole this idea more or less directly from a published children’s book) or even a shruken man trying to communicate his predicament to his friends (also wildly unoriginal). I found myself imagining the possibility that there were even bigger giants out there in the world, looking down on us like we were little ants, and the ants of our world were like atoms to them.  (I swear I had these thoughts before Will Smith opened the locker to discover just that in Men in Black.)  But in all of my fantasies, I never once looked at a microscope with the brilliant reverse perspective that Treat does here.  Nicely put, Treat.

Notes

Thanks to Olivia Judson for bringing this quote to my attention.

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Welcome!

My name is Jef (Jennifer) Akst. I am an aspiring science writer interested primarily in animal behavior. Currently, I am a biology graduate student at Indiana University studying mating behavior and sexual selection in seahorses. (Check out my website for more information.)

Science has always been a passion of mine…from junior year in high school, when I was finally freed of those pesky physical education and foreign language requirements and voluntarily enrolled in five (five!) science classes, to a whirlwind bachelor’s degree in biology at the College of William & Mary to my current graduate endeavors at IU, science has dominated my academic life.

But for the past couple of years, I’ve been intermittently nagged with the worry that I was not as interested in biology as I should be. My studies have grown so focused that I feel I have begun to lose perspective on the rest of the biological community and where my work falls within it. And while I still find seahorses fascinating, minor (and not so minor) setbacks in the research can really dull the excitement I once felt for the sciences. While other students in my programs talk about their research with an enthusiasm that, to me, seems warranted for nothing short of winning the lottery, I haven’t felt ‘all jazzed up’ about anything biological in years.

I’ve struggled with whether or not this was a problem. On the one hand, it seems slightly outlandish to dedicate several years of one’s life (and an infinitely greater number of headaches) to something that could be qualified as a mere interest. On the other, it seems equally ridiculous to expect any one topic of study to generate an interminable excitement that would carry one through to retirement.

So while science remains interesting to me, my passion has clearly dwindled, and I justified this with the gross generalization that it’s just a job, and no one actually likes his job anyway, right? Who really cares? More importantly, who cares if I don’t?

But recently I’ve been feeling excited again. I’ve started to take an interest in science writing. Taking a step back from the ever-narrowing scope of my research has allowed me to once again see science as I used to: a captivating and contemporary field that is constantly churning out hoards of remarkable new research. It has restored my passion for the science that was, in all honesty, starting to bore me. I am once again exploring areas of science outside my particular specialty and LOVING it.

So I’ve decided to start a blog. Not only will it keep me in tune with a much broader focus of behavior than my own research, I get to share what I learn with all of you, and the idea of sparking an enthusiasm for science where disinterest and distrust once resided, motivates me beyond anything I could have predicted. Hopefully you will find these tales of the amazing things animals do as remarkable and noteworthy as I do. Please feel free to leave comments about any of my articles and/or e-mail me with additional questions. Happy reading!