The Alex Rose character sheet gained a plus-1 to wisdom and plus-5 to liver damage this weekend as I celebrated the beginning of my 35th year on this (or any other) planet. Alex also learned the new skills “Majestic Yell” (blast radius of My Lawn when Damn Kids are present) “Your Music Sucks” (single enemy strike toward television when tuned to Top 40 station) and a new daily, “It Doesn’t Feel Broken” (shrug off minor damage to extremities when health insurance has been depleted).
For those who don’t get archaic D&D references, I’m no longer a kid and it’s beginning to show. The extremities thing, for instance, is only sort of a joke — in the last month I’ve either sprained or broken bones in both my hands and wrists.
To be honest, I’m amazed these things don’t break all the time. Of the 206 bones in the human body, there must be, like, 20 in the wrists alone. An incredible feat of engineering, don’t get me wrong, but still, you ever see an X-ray of one? Looks like a bag of marbles.
Luckily, like many of the wondrous creatures on this lush, green marble, I have bilateral symmetry, meaning I have two of almost everything. The prevailing idea for why creatures developed this way, incidentally, is so that if we lose, say, an eye or a kidney, we have a back-up ready to go. Odd that we don’t have two DNA delivery/receiving devices, since that (as far as I can tell) is the whole point of our existence, but hey, that’s evolution’s problem, not mine.
I, obviously, am a special case in that I managed to mess up both my hands at the same time, which makes typing really fun. But, like a few really ingenious species, I am learning to adapt. And that brings us to today’s topic.
According to a new study published in Functional Ecology, some bird species living in the hottest areas around Chernobyl, Ukraine, are actually faring better than counterparts living in relatively lower radiation areas.
The 28th anniversary of the famous nuclear accident inside Reactor 4 that rendered Chernobyl uninhabitable for humans passed on April 24. Engineers there are reportedly still trying to cap the site.
While the overall effects of the disaster on wildlife have been negative, the study from researchers at Paris-Sud University found evidence that some birds there are actually producing higher levels of antioxidants that allow them to block ionizing radiation from damaging their DNA.
Only two of the 16 species sampled were actually worse off, likely because they had higher levels of a certain pigment in their feathers that requires antioxidants to produce, so they didn’t have enough left over to deal with the radiation.
Still, this is believed to be the first documented case of wild animal populations overcoming radiation. Meanwhile, some 8,500 miles away, scientists in Chile were finding another first.
Ernesto Gianoli of the Universidad de La Serena and Fernando Carrasco-Urra of the Universidad de Concepción report in the latest issue of Current Biology that a specific vine called Boquila trifoliolata can and does mimic a variety of host plants, depending on what it is growing on or near.
Mimics in nature are nothing new. My personal favorite is the common octopus, which can make itself look like a rock. I mean, exactly like a rock. It’s spooky.
Some plant species have also found ways to mimic specific hosts, notably orchids, which like to simulate insects on their leaves to sucker in pollinators. But it is rare indeed to find a vine that can change everything from the shape of its leaves to the paths of its veins in copying a wide swath of different hosts.
But that is exactly what the two researchers say they have found after examining some 45 vines growing on 12 different species of host trees.
Now, if they had only found that individual shoots of B. trifoliolata could mimic each of these hosts, that would be something right there. But what they also found was that the vines did not even have to be touching the host to perform this copycat trick, raising a very interesting question: Just how the hell does it know what to do?
At this point, Gianoli and Carrasco-Urra are stumped. They proposed a possible chemical or gene transfer, but really, no clue. Meanwhile, the vine just keeps on doing what it does, benefiting from the added foliage of surrounding plant life that keeps predatory species from nibbling quite so many of its leaves.
While those adaptations are neat parlor tricks, they don’t really impact us as a species. Don’t worry, though, the World Health Organization is here to ruin the party with news that antibiotic-resistant microbes are now a global problem.
This, you might understand, is what those in the medical community like to call “Really Bad News.” It is so bad, in fact, that WHO Assistant Director-General for Health Security Keiji Fukuda warns we might be moving toward a “post-antibiotic era” in which previously treatable diseases once again become killers.
The April 30 report is the first look WHO has taken at global drug resistance. It reads like a rogues gallery of common and insidious bacterial and viral agents responsible for everything from tuberculosis to HIV showing increased resistance to “frontline” antibiotics like penicillins and fluoroquinolones in nearly every corner of the globe.
Fukuda and other experts liken this resistance to a ticking time bomb ready to explode across the globe unless some action is taken now —right now — to develop new drugs.
All just in time for my rapidly decrepitating meat sack to require new and additional medical attention. But hey, at least I still haven’t taken an arrow to the knee, so I got that going for me.
Alex Rose covers the Delaware County Courthouse for the Daily Times. Follow him on Twitter at @arosedelco. Check out his blog at delcoscience.blogspot.com. Email him at email@example.com. His column appears every Tuesday.