Drain the Swamp or Time to get a little political

  Drain the swamp.

Look how dead and scary the swamp looks. Courtesy of Spork Spelunking 

 You have heard the saying as a campaign slogan from the president-elect on numerous occasions and to anyone that has studied ecology, this really shows the depth of his understanding of biology or science in general.

That is, it is not very deep. What else is new?

   This is because swamps, marshes and other types of wetland ecosystems are valuable, important real estate when it comes to providing needs to humans.  You can see the value of wetlands if you are fortunate enough to live within driving distance of a wastewater treatment plant that handles sewage.

  If you ever decide to take a tour of a wastewater treatment facility, you will learn that the primary movers for water treatment comes from microorganism growth in large tanks called bioreactors. The magic happens when the sewage water comes into contact with bacteria that are hanging onto sewer sludge and they grow, consuming the organic compounds and leaving byproducts that are harmless and don't attract unwanted pathogens. The result is remarkably clean water that is safe to drink once the water is sanitized, usually with chlorine solutions.

Courtesy of American Water College

   So what does this have to do with swamps? The two things that bioreactors absolutely need to operate, besides tax dollars, is standing water and bacteria. Swamps have this in spades plus bonuses, including trees, soil access to ground water, and an adaptive ecosystem that provides for wildlife. All of those bonuses are invaluable to humans and can be measured monetarily by environmental scientists and biologists in a concept called ecosystem services. The best part about these services is that if they are smartly managed they can be used without spending much if any money.

Some techniques incorporate some swamp features into wastewater treatment. Wikipedia

   Draining the swamp is a phrase used to evoke an image of improving a piece of land, getting rid of toxic water to make way for farming on the fertile, nutrient rich soil that is left behind. Its an old phrase that certainly dates the president-elect. Donald Trump uses it to insinuate that Washington is full of toxic components (i.e. public officials, lobbyists and lawmakers) that he will remove and replace with more useful components, his pick of  whom he considers Washington outsiders. I guess in terms of the biological analogy, he wants to remove toxic water and replacing it with corn or wheat, although scientists would probably say he is planting salt instead.

  Before people applied scientific research towards understanding wetlands, it was true that swamps became more profitable when they were drained and a farm was grown on it. However, once the soil ran out of nutrients, the land was useless for farming unless water was imported and fertilizers were used. Fertilizers are notorious for being costly and damaging because of farmer's dependence on them and environmental consequences from run-off. Now it's known that if you leave a swamp intact and farm on it with crops that are adapted to the environment such as rice, you can preserve your fertilizing potential and the water supply. Not to mention preserving fish nurseries for the enjoyment of local anglers.

I saw this in action when I volunteered with Honko Mangrove Education and Conservation on the island nation of Madagascar. Villagers there took value in their mangrove swamps by farming reeds for basket weaving, by ecotourism, harvesting wood, and by fishing in the channels for crabs, invertebrates and small fish. The alternative was to bulldoze the land and make a shrimp farm that lasts a few years before collapsing and leading to a long recovery. Profitable in the short term, but devastating to the people that live there.

A Malagasy marsh near the mangroves of Ambondrolava

So what I say in response to Donald Trump is this: save the swamp. You can make alterations to the swamp and make it more beneficial to people, you can even change the size of the swamp if that helps; but don't drain the swamp. We need the swamp.

Look how  happy that swamp house is!  Courtesy of Flickr creative commons

References:
The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity initiative

EPA: How Wastewater Treatment works

Clarkson BR, Ausseil AE, Gerbeaux P 2013. Wetland ecosystem services. In Dymond JR ed. Ecosystem services in New Zealand – conditions and trends. Manaaki Whenua Press, Lincoln, New Zealand.

And if you care about Trump's drain the swamp idea
Trump pledges to drain the swamp
Donald Trump's talk of 'draining the swamp' rings hollow
What ‘drain the swamp’ really means

Creature concepts in Shin Godzilla (Spoilers)

Hello all,

    After seeing the newest Godzilla reboot during the U.S. release, becoming captivated by it, and seeing it again; I decided to attempt starting up my blog again after 4 years on the ice. The timing is also convenient since I am starting graduate school and exploring various avenues of research.
Lets begin.

   Shin Godzilla is a great film that introduces fresh and contemporary ideas to the character of Godzilla, essentially revamping it for a modern audiences. Unlike the first reboot that rehashed the same outdated origin story from the original, that of a T. rex awakened and mutated by radiation, this movie welcomes a new understanding of genetics and evolution (to a certain degree). The benefit of the changes to the reboot is to activate the imagination of audiences and inspire new interest in expanding the franchise.

  I love the Showa series and the Heisei series (Heisei series movies came out when I was young and impressionable), however, the faulty explanations behind the kaiju phenomenon had me grasping for personal interpretations that I could make it work for me. It was hard for me to rationalize how radiation could be blamed for the strange and sudden mutations seen in Godzilla movies as late as the 90's when most people realize that radiation basically just makes you deteriorate.

   Before I go on further in tangential fashion I would like to finally get to some of the ideas brought forward by Shin Godzilla. Now I enter full spoiler mode. If you haven't seen the movie, please stop and go out and see it before continuing.

Just stop and walk away.

Godzilla enters the stage in a entirely foreign form than what we are used to. It looks like a strange amphibian and they describe it to be morphologically similar to a lungfish. It seems to flounder into the city pauses and transforms into a bipedal Godzilla-like form, notably growing arms from stumpy looking pectoral fins. The one government official overseeing the transformation note that it is "evolving" reminiscent of Pokemon, but the rest quickly regard it as a mutation. It still sounds a lot like the old movies at this point. It gets more interesting in the next acts when Godzilla returns for the second time in a massive form recognizable as Godzilla. After collecting more data on the monster, the scientists on the ground conclude that it has a vast genome, they compare it to humans as being eight times longer. This gives an idea of how realistic this is, and perhaps eight times larger may be a little small for calling Godzilla the most evolved creature on the planet, as they do in the movie.
 

First form. Courtesy of  AlphaPonpo

 Introducing a genetic cause to the mutations is groundbreaking for the franchise, because now it opens up the discussion beyond established mythology. Biologists know that animals will up-regulate or down-regulate genes for an active physiological adaptation to the environment (or epigenetics). If there is a giant surplus of genes that can fulfill these needs, then it all sort of makes sense. Dramatic changes seen in insects are caused by the down-regulation of a juvenile hormone producing gene that suspends metamorphosis, for instance, and similarly amphibian metamorphosis is controlled by thyroid gene regulation. This type of explanation is needed to explain the dramatic changes that transformed an earth animal into Godzilla. Add in nuclear waste to the mix  for it to adapt to and there is your contemporary reasoning for The King of Monsters

 If Godzilla had been accumulating genes from its environment through transposable elements or a sophisticated mechanism involving viruses then there's a chance (in the way chance works in the movie studio) that such evolution could occur. The complicated mechanism behind it  would not really be comprehensible to the humans in the movie, at least not in the early stages. This idea makes the monster appealing and fascinating for me all over again.

   The idea that Godzilla is evolving right before our eyes and that it could be from a genetic source, ties in nicely with a personal favorite fan theory I found here. The end of the movie showed creatures imprisoned inside the structure of Godzilla's long tail, and gave clues to what its next plan of attack was before being defeated. According to the fan theory, it was getting ready to spawn an army of engineers to take down humanity. The reproduction of clones to populate a eusocial super-organism is particularly ant-like and, provided the genes were available to it, could have been encoded in its genome.

Last shot of Shin Godzilla. Courtesy of Toho,Co.

 A bonus thought experiment this concept provides are ethical considerations of what it means to have predetermined fate, if all of your being is laid out before you are born in your genome. Godzilla shows that there is some wiggle room after all and maybe we can win against our selfish genes. 

Aaaagh! Real Zombies!

Toga zombie is the worst!

  The zombie craze that has crept up on the world has displayed a large fanfare and with it discussion on the imminent zombie apocalypse. Everyone that has an inkling of interest in the genre has come up with their "zombie team," people that one would  enlist to help them survive in the aftermath of the zombie plague that destroys the world as we know it. I've been a zombie fan for years, since I first watched Romero's "Dead" series in high school (c. 2007 C.E.), So I may write a longer post than the usual due to personal bias.  

There zombies have shown up in every part of media from movies, games(board and video), books to even tv, and the mythos for zombies have changed over the years to accommodate trends in the public hysteria or the time.

The movie known for being the first film to center around zombies

Early Days: The idea of zombies have been around for a long time, generally being undead slaves to a powerful user of forbidden magic. Originating in Africa, zombies are first apparent in folklore where a person uses witchcraft to control another as a slave without will of its own, generally after being killed and revived. This takes its introductory form into North American culture with the 1932 film, "White Zombie." In it a voodoo priest runs amok with the protagonists love triangle with his ability to resurrect people as slaves.

The second sequel, and my favorite.

Modern Conception: The modern conception of the genre starts with the 1968 infamous horror movie, "Night Of The Living Dead," where zombies are transformed from mindless slaves to cannibalistic marauders. The premise is simple, the protagonist survivors must try to stay alive under an onslaught of graveyard ghouls that want to kill and eat them. There isn't really a formal reason why the dead come back to life other than the clues that are given; the zombies start rising after a satellite brings mysterious radiation from Venus back into the earth's atmosphere.
This type of 'radiation zombie' comes from the leftover hysteria over the successful atomic age horror movies, where the unknown and harmful effects of atomic radiation that transform natural things into horrible unnatural monsters.
This movie sets the standard for the zombie apocalypse genre, where the sheer numbers and ubiquity have started a quick breakdown of society into small pockets of degenerated survivors in a sea of zombie hostility. Its a genre that brings back the epic man versus nature (or in this case, un-nature?) conflict that has been successful in the past.

Shifting Origin: Since George A. Romero's "Dead" series, while the main concept has stayed the same, the cause of the zombie mayhem goes through a shift as people have become more knowledgeable to the facts of radiation poisoning."The Return Of The Living Dead," series during the 1990s, shifted the main culprit to the experimental chemical gas "2-4-5 Trioxin" that changes people into comical corpses that long for human brains. It invoked the fear of pollution and the effects on humans and the environment when the chemical saturates the cemetery ground as a pollutant in rainclouds.

This differs from the "Dead" series not only in the sense of a different back story, but also in the way zombies are spread throughout the world. When radiation turned people into zombies the population at large was already contaminated and one only needed to die to change into a zombie. "Return" started the trend in which a source of contamination spread the zombies in a plague-like fashion and is most common zombie storyline today. It is no longer just a fight to stay alive, but  also so as not to contract the zombie disease.

  Throughout all the zombie genre, zombies were naturally diseased and people that were bitten by them generally died soon after and turned into zombies and the rest of the group have to deal with the moral consequences of having to kill their friends and family. The difference here is that you don't have to be bitten by them to change into a zombie, only the original contaminate/disease that created them!

 The fear of epidemic is the more terrifying concept today because of the H1N1 and bird influenza scares that put people on edge, not mention the effects of the AIDS epidemic. The government has failed us before when AIDS first appeared on the scene, who's to say another horrible disease might show up and we won't know how to stop it before we are all wiped out?    

So could anything like that actually happen? Can people actually become zombies, rotting necrotic flesh not withstanding? Could an apocalyptic zombie world happen as well? We'll see what science has to say about that in my next post.
-'Till then, True Believers!(as Stan Lee would say)

P.S. - I've posted links to the Monster Island Resort podcast page because the host can explain the intricacies  of horror genre in a much more socially aware context than I could ever, so if you're confused about the link, just play the audio file posted on the MIR page.

Human-Cyborg Relations

As I promised, this post will be mostly about cyborgs.

    How far(or close?) are we to creating the 6 million dollar man? or the bionic woman?  A lot closer than tv and movies have told us.

More like the 60 million dollar man

    There have been successful 'bionic' prosthetics for humans for years and it appears to be getting better every year. The idea is that robotic muscles can be attached to the spinal cord or nerves and can thus be controlled by thinking about moving the limb. The technology is there, people that lose limbs now have the possibility of reviving lost functionality. Bionic limbs aren't even overly expensive as suggested in the Economist, although building a fully functional cyborg, would be a different story, the pentagon has been spending 50 million to 100 million dollars on bionic prototype research.

     
   A more obscure and significantly less practical science with the use of cyborg technology is the use human limbs on an actual robot. In theory it seems like it would be straightforward, much like the technique used in bionic limbs, a robot can just connect wires in a way that transmits a signal to the limb's nerve pathway and there it is! The human limb is now part of the collective. It would obviously be more intricate than that, but nothing a calculating computer mind couldn't overcome. Fortunately for us, this isn't as much of a reality as robots don't have the means to begin harvesting our body parts. It does, however, make a great scary antagonist in Star Trek.


 Thinking of the human body as a mechanical process brings to my mind one of my favorite short stories that I've read recently by the infamous H.P. Lovecraft, Herbert West: Reanimator. The main theme of the story is about the conflict of modern scientific view of the human body versus the concept of the soul. In it the doctor Herbert West and his obedient assistant research the process of chemically bringing alive the recently dead.One of the more grisly experiments, which eventually led to the doctor's impending doom, was one in which he severed and revived separate limbs to prove that each limb can operate independently from the main body.      

You can hear an audio file of the tale here from my favorite podcast of all time, the Monster Island Resort, hosted by Miguel Rodriguez.

With this kind of segway, there can only be one kind of science to investigate in the next post. -'Till then!

The life of a space plasma

Hi friends!

So after re-watching one of my favorites, Virus, I'm left with two more questions.

The Drej are pure energy!

1) Is there possibility for a sentient form of life to exist that has no physical body and is comprised of energy? This kind of fantastical life-form was the main antagonist in the movie and it is a reoccurring theme in a lot of sci-fi. Beings like these like to especially pop up in Star Trek and Stargate. 

and

2) Perhaps an easier question: what is the viability for robots to successfully utilize human or otherwise animal parts? I know we've been experimenting with different kinds of robotic prosthetic parts in people, can that same process be reversed for the monster in Virus or for the Borg in Star Trek?

But can robots do this?

We can do this

First I want to post about the first question, of energy based lifeforms, before I get into the real meat that is cyborg part replacements.

Plasma is what you see in lightning

  Energy based life-forms are a common alternative to crafting aliens with a creative physical appearance in science fiction for several reasons. Energy beings are generally god-like beings with a lot of impressive powers. In Star Trek, they often transport spaceships to other parts of the universe or have some kind of social experiment trial planned for the crew. In Stargate, the characters uncover secrets left behind by an ancient advanced race of beings that have conveniently transcended to a higher, energy plane of existence creating an ethical debate on the existence of an afterlife. 

Now for the science. There is some evidence to support the idea for inorganic material to behave life-like in the plasma state. When an element is subjected to extremely high temperatures it becomes a super-critical fluid also known as plasma, which has peculiar characteristics. Plasma is formed inside of stars and terrestrially as lightning among many other phenomena that are really common in space and a lot more common than the necessary environment for life as we know it. Laboratory experiments with plasma have yielded similar qualities to that of a single cell organism. Grains of dust can form a helical structure similar to DNA and an ionic bilayer is formed creating a closed membrane. Spheres of plasma can even duplicate themselves much like a cell would, by splitting in two.

Amoebas in Space! All  thanks to plasma.

Okay, so maybe tiny plasma 'cells' can be made in a lightning bolt on earth, but can they evolve into into lifeforms as complicated as the carbon based life that we know?  Some people theorize that there might be plasma organisms that are somewhat similar to the carbon based organisms we know of but we just can't detect them. This sounds a bit more on the fiction side, though.

From what it seems like to me and the lack of helpful evidence of a kind of sentient or otherwise intelligent life form based on plasma, plasma based life wouldn't be more complex than a simple bacteria floating through space without magical powers or abilities that are so depicted in science fiction. I would buy into the structure being a starter for carbon based life forms as Tsytovich speculates with his research, but not its own life highly evolved plasma life form.

-'Till science proves I'm wrong!