Small Wonders: The blog

…or it could be very, very big indeed. One of those things our future grandchildren will simply not understand how the human race managed without.

Liquid Glass

This list was originally complied as a “fun facts”-type publicity handout a while back; thought you might like it too.

1) Some microbes can survive temperatures of over 120°C (about 250°F).

2) If you were to place all the bacterial cells found in an average cow stomach end to end, you’d go insane. It’s really really hard.

3) Plus it would stink to high heaven.

4) I imagine the cow wouldn’t be too happy about it either.

5) Contrary to popular opinion, bacteria can and do engage in sexual activity. See chapter 4 of the book for the shocking details

6) Under optimal conditions, the life span of a single microbial cell is: forever

7) about 1 out of 5 people do not wash their hands after going to the toilet. Look around the room. How many hands have you shaken today?

8 ) Microbial infections can cause or aid the development of mental illness.

9) Microbes account for 1-2 kilograms of your body weight.

10) Bacteriological tests show that a typical toilet bowl is a much cleaner place than a typical office computer keyboard.

11) Despite the previous fact, most people are healthy most of the time. This is an important thing to bear in mind when reading scary hygiene statistics. We have an immune system. It works well.

12) The humble cockroach, hailed in popular myth as radiation proof, is about ten times more resistant to radiation than humans. The bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans thrives happily after being zapped with 1,500 times the human lethal dose, and can apparently withstand twice that.

13) A human fetus is sterile, i.e. it is not contaminated by bacteria. A week-old human baby’s gut already contains a thriving bacterial community, which is essential to its future health and wellbeing. Unintentional contamination of the baby by fecal matter is an important role of good motherhood, but one that is rarely if ever mentioned.

14) Despite increased federal funding in the last two decades, the illiteracy rate among fungi is still estimated at 99.99%.

15) The original life forms on earth, appearing about 4 billion years ago were microbial. The vast majority of life on earth, both in diversity and in numbers, always was and still is microbial.

16) The original microbial life forms were anaerobic, i.e., oxygen was poisonous to them. Some of their descendants today still are.

17) The HIV virus was originally discovered on a 1971 secret manned NASA mission to Venus, but the government hushed it up.

18) Every time you wash your hands, thousands upon thousands of microbes die horrible deaths.

19) the bacterial species Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus is the fastest swimmer in the world (relative to body size); if one such cell were enlarged to one-tenth human size and placed in a pool to compete against Michael Phelps in the 100-meter freestyle, it would swim the distance in about six seconds. It would then proceed to attach to Phelps, bore a hole in him, climb in and devour him from the inside. Thankfully, real Bdellovibrio restrict themselves to hunting other bacteria.

20) There are an estimated 10 microbial cells in or on your body for every “human” cell.

I’m actually not a big fan of “fun facts” (as you may have noticed reading mine). I don’t trust facts without context. The right kind of fun fact, for me, is one that doesn’t just give you a short spray of levity and then dissolves; it stays around in my brain and demands a proper context to fit into, and will not let go until I provide one.

Good Things happening! The American edition of SW has won the (take a deep breath, now) 2010  American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) / Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books in the  Young Adult Science Book category.

Whew.  Long prize name, there. SB&F – or Science Books & Films to give its full name – is an AAAS-published review journal for educators and libraries.

I’m well pleased, as you may imagine. Plus, I get to go to the AAAS annual meeting in San Diego in February and flutter like a butterfly between sessions. Plus the book   got a nice write-up (subscription required to view text) in Science journal (which the AAAS publishes). Like nearly every aspiring scientist, I used to dream that my name would one day appear in Science;  I gave up on that dream pretty quickly (and painlessly), as I realised quite early on that  I’m not nearly that good a  scientist. Now it happened …sort of… in a roundabout kind of fashion…

So, quite joyous and even a little proud. As good a reason as I’ll get to put one of my favourite songs here: Stevie Ray Vaughan’s kickass track “Pride and Joy”. Enjoy.

Professor Ada Yonath has won (with two colleagues) the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Hear hear. I was lucky enough to attend a talk she gave a few years ago at a conference, where she presented several film clips of the structure of the ribosome (specifically, the bacterial kind), how it works and its  interactions with antibiotic compounds.

These were not general schematic illustrations, the kind you usually come across in textbooks and talks,  but accurate representations of the crystallographic structure – which made the whole thing much better, and, I found, jaw-droppingly beautiful.

You can see some of these clips and illustrations at the Yonath lab webpage. Go have a look, see what the fuss is about. The colours are artificially added, but the rest is pure nature.

“Good” is better than “Better than”

There are plenty of good things about being a postgraduate student in the History and Philosophy of Science. Being of any use to anyone is not one of them. Unfortunately, my calling offers precious little opportunities for those “man-on-the spot” moments, the ones where you can confidently intervene in a situation and resolve it using your skills. Doctors and nurses have them. Firemen, policemen, lifeuards, veterinarians, plumbers, electricians, lawyers too, in a way. I can easily think of “stand back, everyone” scenarios  for engineers, athletes, chemists and physicists (MacGyver obviously cornering the market there), even IT professionals (in this I’ve been sort of  preempted by xkcd, as usual) and Seinfeld memorably gave us the ultimate Marine Biologist fantasy.

With a bit of work we  could probably produce a chart with all professions listed by their “it’s all right, I’m a ….” probability index, running from traumatologists and airline pilots downwards. And down at the very bottom, together with marketing directors, interior decorators and Dunkin’ Donuts employees, are us humanities postgrads. What we do may or may not matter, but no-one will ever expect us to save the day.

I can do helpful things if neccesary. Only last night Daniel was sick and I was efficiency itself (this, incidentally, included the completely non-ironic utterance of the phrase “go ahead, vomit on daddy.” Parents will understand me ).  It’s just that as an academic of sorts, one’s contribution is more or less guaranteed to always be in the long run and the broad view, never in the Here&Now.

Which is why I will treasure this day from here on in. It started with an unexpected wallet I found at the train station. I glanced inside and noticed a library card – also, no credit cards and hardly any cash at all – and since I was heading towards the library anyway, it was but the work of a moment to decide that it would be wise to drop it off there. Good citizenship? Yes. Sensible decision-making? Quite. A dazzling display of creativity? Not really.

It was later that day, as I was bravely tapping away at this very keyboard, in that very library, that I heard murmurs behind me. The phrases “…article from Nature…New Scientist…minicells” gave me pause. I turned around discreetly – two librarians were Googling something, and they were, I could immediately sense, not getting anywhere. I took a deep breath and carpe diem‘d: I rose from my seat and said “excuse me, I’m a microbiologist, can I help?”

(note: I’m not a practicing microbiologist anymore, but I sensed that my true identity would be better left concealed for the time being, if only because by the time I finish saying “I’m a student in the field of the History, Sociology and Philosophy of Science” most people have already wandered off.)

It turned out that there was this nice man who was trying to obtain an article from “Nature Biotechnology”. His wife was ill, and he’d read about a new sort of treatment for it and wanted that article for her doctor to read. The library didn’t have access to Nature fulltext articles. I said “I have access” and got working. The article was located and printed, and off he went.

Now, you might say that it’s a very very small thing to do, bordering on the pathetic.  It would be utterly pathetic to attach any importance to it. Luckily, I don’t attach any importance to it. This is simply the one and only scenario where my professional skills could conceivably have helped anyone in any way, and I wanted the record to show that life can, at times, trump hypothetical scenarios.

This article from ScienceDaily explores the high-profile issue of nuclear waste and its removal – this time it’s E.coli who’ll be cleaning up uranium from polluted water. The news understandably generated a flurry of “OMG mutant nuclear bacteria”-type comments in slashdot, god bless them. Anyway, as the article itself notes, the idea is over a decade old – the one thing that is new is that they’ve found a way to use a waste product as the substrate of the reaction, which makes it (potentially) a neat way of reusing waste products to clean up other waste products.

“Creation”, a film about Charles Darwin’s inner struggle with belief, is apparently not going to be screened commercially in the US – no distributor wants to touch it, because a film about Darwin and religion is judged as too controversial for American audiences.

I haven’t seen the film, so I don’t know if it’s any good; also, films, being visual works tend to simplify complex debates, so I’m cautious . A New Scientist review suggests it might be less than perfect. (then again, they were less than ecstatic about my stuff a month ago, so, you know…). Still, you’d think audiences would’ve liked to be given the opportunity to see for themselves. I understand the film contains no violence, nudity, strong language, portrayal of drug use or teenagers performing unnatural acts with pies. perhaps the director should’ve put some of that stuff in – it might’ve helped with the distribution problems…

The review also mentions leading actor Paul Bettany’s performance as a ship’s surgeon and naturalist in Peter Weir’s 2003 Master and Commander: The Far side of the World, which is one of my absolute favourite performances ever (the DVD of the film effortlessly tops our household’s “most watched” list), and not only because it resonates powerfully with Darwinian history.

Lastly, I find it somewhat ironic that when this very same actor portrayed a murderous monk, the film grossed hunderds of millions in the US.

boingboing posted a review of  The Invisible Kingdom. Ah, fame at last…

Have I mentioned that Small Wonders is being published in America? I don’t think I mentioned that Small Wonders is being published in America. Well,  Small Wonders is being published in America. The name has been changed to The Invisible Kingdom, and it got some updates (things move quickly in the world of Microbiology) and a new bonus Bonus Track at the end; also, some Australian references (Cricket, the distance from Sydney to Melbourne) were replaced by American-friendly ones (Baseball). Other than that, it’s the same book.

Which leads me to wonder what non-Australian readers will make of the title “Darwin to Cairns and back” which I gave to one of the sections. It’s my favourite title, since it describes perfectly both the issue I was writing about and a rather challenging road-trip route.