The study was published last week…” story continued here at ScienceDaily.

In my last post, I didn’t talk about Ebola. This is primarily because the Ebola virus plushy toy is nowhere near as cute as, say, Chlamydia or Herpes:

Chlamydia!

Herpes!

I mean, seriously…the Ebola virus just looks like an earthworm of some sort. But despite its unfortunate lack of cute, Ebola is a big deal. A really big deal. In this post, I’ll tell you what the big deal is, and why you just might have to start worrying about it.

First of all, the real Ebola virus is just as unimpressive-looking as the toy:

The reason Ebola is a big deal right now is that there’s been a recent outbreak of it in Western Uganda. And some of you might be all like, “That’s sad and everything, but I definitely don’t live anywhere close to Western Uganda.” And while that may be true, you should be aware that an Ebola-infected prisoner from Uganda has escaped…and no one knows where he is.

Ebola is highly infectious and contagious, so you should really be concerned if this man goes…well, anywhere, really. Europe, Australia, Peru, your backyard…an Ebola outbreak that isn’t properly contained has the potential to turn into a global epidemic.

Everyone would be wearing these super unfashionable hazmat suits.

The symptoms of Ebola are pretty nasty, so you should stay away from people with the following disturbing side effects (and make sure you don’t have them yourself):

• bloody diarrhea
• vomiting
• seizures
• bleeding from the eyes and mouth (and other mucous membranes)
• and more.

I have to imagine you would keep your distance from a person with these issues anyway, and that you’d get yourself to a doctor if you were experiencing them. The virus can spread through contact with bodily fluids, and there is no cure or vaccine for it.

That’s right, this thing is ugly. Sixty-eight percent of the infected die, and all doctors can really do is try to keep you hydrated as you bloody diarrhea yourself to death. Ignore the fact that “diarrhea” isn’t a verb.

Ebola is so bad, it’s made its way into multiple major motion pictures. Remember Osmosis Jones? That’s okay, no one really does.

The man himself.

Voiced by Chris Rock, Osmosis is an anthropomorphic white blood cell who’s trying to kill a virus that’s trying to kill Bill Murray. Okay. Now that you’ve taken all of that in, add the fact that the evil virus is named Thrax and looks like this:

Kind of bad-ass, actually.

Alright, the point of all this is that, even though Thrax can be quoted as saying “Ebola is a case of DANDRUFF compared to me!” Thrax is just some completely made-up guy with a long claw finger that sets cells on fire. There is no possible way for him to be worse than Ebola. That’s my take, anyway.

More on Ebola in movies: Have you heard of Outbreak? This is one you should actually watch — the cast includes Dustin Hoffman, Morgan Freeman, Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Kevin Spacey…wow. Well, in this movie, a fictional version of Ebola takes hold in Zaire, and all these actors try to do something about it. Random fact: A real outbreak of Ebola struck Zaire just a few months after the movie came out.

Point is, Ebola is featured as the biggest, baddest virus out there, and with good reason (refer to symptoms listed above). The outbreak in Uganda is a serious issue, drawing local, national, an international responses. Even if the outbreak doesn’t end up affecting you directly, and of course I hope it doesn’t, keep your eyes and ears on the situation in Uganda. Because even though you could say, “it’s not affecting me,” we all can and should show compassion for those suffering from a disease that causes this much misery, and in a community that doesn’t enjoy the medical facilities that we may have.

Stay strong, Uganda.

Kinsman J (2012). “A time of fear”: local, national, and international responses to a large Ebola outbreak in Uganda. Globalization and health, 8 (1) PMID: 22695277

No date rapes here!

Understatement of the century: date rape is not cool. Neither committing it, nor being a victim of it, should ever ever happen. As such, I want to promote awareness of something that could potentially be used as a date rape drug, but that’s also found in practically everyone’s medicine cabinet.

I’ve been conflicted for a long time about blogging about this, because I don’t want to enable those who seek to do bad things, but in the end I’ve decided that knowledge is power. And if you know about a particular danger, you can probably do more to protect yourself from it.

Also, I’m going to talk about these straws that scientists are working on, that might just prevent date rapes. Ahhh, now there’s a refreshing idea!

I won’t beat around the bush; the potential date rape drug that most people already own is…Visine. You know, the eye drops that clear up bloodshot eyes. To be fair, Clear Eyes
eye drops have just as much potential as a date rape drug. Plus they have this awesomely terrible commercial with Ben Stein:

The reason these eye drops, and, I presume, all the other brands of eye drops out there, have potential applications as date rape drugs is because they all contain tetrahydrozoline:

Innocent enough looking little thing, right? But, it’s not that innocent. Well, not when it’s in the wrong hands of somebody with bad intentions. You see, there was a very small publication that came from the Kentucky Regional Poison Center in 2007. The publication describes a guy who, in 2003, had been raping a woman and four children, all relatives of his, I believe, by adding Visine to their drinks.

While the tetrahydrozoline in eye drops will shrink the blood vessels in your eyes and make them less apparent, tetrahydrozoline ingested becomes a very strong high blood pressure medicine. When your blood pressure gets lowered too far, you can become drowsy, with a slowed heart rate and impaired breathing, and you can even enter a coma. Essentially, ingesting Visine or other eye drops can make someone an easier target for date rape. It is my sincere hope that by sharing this information I am NOT enabling those who would do harm, but empowering people to avoid potential dangers.

Speaking of avoiding dangers, I love drinking things through straws, and scientists in Israel are now working on straws that can detect the presence of date rape drugs in drinks! This is a truly great invention. It would be inexpensive (about $5), and all you’d have to do is dip it in your drink to instantly know whether date rape drugs had been added to it. Classic date rape drugs like ketamine and GHB are detected with, so far, 100% accuracy and no false positives, and when these chemicals interact with the testing solution in the straw, the drink turns cloudy and a little red light turns on in the straw. The developers are considering adding Rohypnol (aka “roofies”) to the list of detectable compounds in their straw. And even though using Visine as a date rape drug is rare in comparison to these other drugs I’ve just mentioned, might I suggest these scientists add tetrahydrozoline to the drug detection list as well?

If these straws really catch on (and why wouldn’t they?!), there should definitely be a push to stock them at every seedy bar and questionable frat party in the world. Just sayin’.

Stay nerdy safe!

Spiller HA, Rogers J, & Sawyer TS (2007). Drug facilitated sexual assault using an over-the-counter ocular solution containing tetrahydrozoline (Visine). Legal medicine (Tokyo, Japan), 9 (4), 192-5 PMID: 17320456

I will be interested to watch the trends in Pfizer stocks in the coming days, because it’s their injectable long-acting contraceptive, Depo-Provera, that is at the heart of a controversial new study in Lancet Infectious Diseases. A team based at the University of Washington in Seattle assessed nearly 4,000 couples in seven sub-Saharan African countries for rates of HIV acquisition and transmission, and the findings were pretty clear cut: women using long-acting progesterone-based birth control or low-dose combination hormonal oral contraceptives were twice as likely to acquire HIV, and their male partners were twice as likely to contract the virus from them.

The Depo-Provera shot, used by over 90 million women worldwide, is made convenient by the fact that it only needs to be administered once every three months to be effective. The active ingredient in the shot is the hormone progesterone, which is normally at its highest levels during the second half of a woman’s menstrual cycle. As a contraceptive, progesterone acts by thinning the uterine wall so that a fertilized egg cannot attach. However, this hormone also thins the vaginal wall, which may make it easier for the HIV virus to infect uninfected women and to be passed on to their male partners thereafter.

So why are some scientists basically saying “I told you so”? Well, fifteen years ago in 1996, a study was published in Nature Medicine (a well-read journal) that showed female rhesus monkeys with progesterone implants had 7.7 times the risk of contracting simian immunodeficiency virus (essentially monkey HIV) compared to monkeys implanted with placebo.

“How many years has it been that the non-human primate model, and other researchers, have been warning about this and being ignored? What, 15 years now? Shocking.” - John Moore, HIV scientist at Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University, in an email to colleagues and journalists on October 5.

The WHO will meet early next year to decide whether to revise the recommendation for injectable contraceptive use in HIV-positive women and women partners of HIV-positive men. But why weren’t these issues considered 15 years ago, when the study in monkeys came out? The first author of that study, Preston Marx, says it’s because nobody wanted to deal with a threat to a cheap and accessible contraceptive method with numerous benefits in developing countries. He says,

“I was in one meeting accused of massaging the data. It was real heat.”

On the other side of the debate, professionals in public health and epidemiology point out that hormonal contraceptive use was low among the cohort studied (anywhere between 15-33% of women depending on the time point in the study). Also, birth control is of especially great benefit in developing countries where unwanted pregnancies can bring serious harm or even death to the pregnant woman.

That said, this is clearly a very controversial finding with incredibly far-reaching implications, depending on what follow-up studies conclude. At the very least, women everywhere who are on birth control or considering it, as well as the partners of those women, should be aware of this ongoing debate.

In the interest of being balanced, check out this story about what people consider the confounding factors in this study: “The Faulty Birth-Control-HIV Link” in The Daily Beast.

Stay nerdy and stay safe.

Wadman, M. (2011). Contraceptive risk of HIV long suspected Nature DOI: 10.1038/news.2011.582

Heffron R, Donnell D, Rees H, Celum C, Mugo N, Were E, de Bruyn G, Nakku-Joloba E, Ngure K, Kiarie J, Coombs RW, Baeten JM, & for the Partners in Prevention HSV/HIV Transmission Study Team (2011). Use of hormonal contraceptives and risk of HIV-1 transmission: a prospective cohort study. The Lancet infectious diseases PMID: 21975269

Marx PA, Spira AI, Gettie A, Dailey PJ, Veazey RS, Lackner AA, Mahoney CJ, Miller CJ, Claypool LE, Ho DD, & Alexander NJ (1996). Progesterone implants enhance SIV vaginal transmission and early virus load. Nature medicine, 2 (10), 1084-9 PMID: 8837605

Left: actually viewed; right: computer reconstruction based on brain imaging

Well, it looks like the future is finally here. I wasn’t quite sure how it was going to present itself, but it seems to have come in the form of UC Berkeley scientists who have developed a “decoder” that can measure our brain activity and reconstruct our visual experiences. In other words, 20 years from now we might not ask eye-witnesses to describe a suspect…we’ll just analyze their brain activity and reconstruct the suspect’s image for ourselves.

I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

I’ll be honest: I would be way out of my league if I tried to give a technical account of how the decoder works, but this research is so mind-blowing that I had to share it.

The scientists behind this project were dedicated, spending hours being as still as possible inside an MRI machine so that a functional MRI (fMRI) could measure the blood flow through the visual processing centers of their brains while they watched movie trailers. Each second, a computer made associations between the images in the movie and the resulting activity in the brain.

fMRI image

The decoder algorithm developed by these researchers can describe how temporal and spatial information are represented by fMRI data. Five thousand hours of random YouTube video clips were fed into the computer and this same algorithm predicted the types of fMRI responses these clips would elicit. From this, the researchers were able to take the fMRI data generated while movie trailers were viewed, then reconstruct the images seen by the person using composites of YouTube videos that had the most similar predicted fMRI signature to the real data. The results I’m showing below may look crude, but the fact that they’re just based on an algorithmic analysis of fMRI data is incredible. 

On the left is a still from the actual trailer viewed by the subject, and on the right is the composite put together by the algorithm:

A continuous video composite created by the algorithm is embedded below:

The implications of this go far beyond being able to see a fuzzy recreation of something you’ve already seen, or even my hypothetical future scenario of computer-generated criminal suspect renditions. This technology could allow us to have computer-generated versions of our dreams, which we could show to anyone we wanted. People who are physically paralyzed would potentially have an entirely new means of expression. And what would the images generated by a schizophrenic mind look like?

Like I said…the future is definitely here.

Naselaris T, Kay KN, Nishimoto S, & Gallant JL (2011). Encoding and decoding in fMRI. NeuroImage, 56 (2), 400-10 PMID: 20691790

Shinji Nishimoto, An T. Vu, Thomas Naselaris, Yuval Benjamini, Bin Yu, Jack L. Gallant. Reconstructing Visual Experiences from Brain Activity Evoked by Natural Movies. Current Biology, 22 September 2011

That guy's simle says, "They're so impressed - thanks, Try Nerdy!"

Let’s be honest: Sometimes, you just want to know enough to sound reasonably informed during your coffee break. Here at Try Nerdy we totally respect that, so we’re putting together a list of the coolest nerdiest things that have had people talking in the last few days and weeks. And if you haven’t yet found yourself pulled into a conversation about one of these topics, then get people talking and get nerd credibility by asking “Hey, did you hear about…?”

1. “…That planet made of diamond?” Yes, Kim Kardashian’s 20.5-carat diamond engagement ring has been officially upstaged, and in a major way.  In late August, the journal Science published an article by researchers at the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia that, rather humbly, describes using a telescope to find a planet that is 4,000 light years away and most likely made of diamond. I say “humbly” because, despite the epicness of the find, the word “diamond” appears only once in the article, at the very end, and in parentheses:

The chemical composition, pressure and
dimensions of the [planet] make it certain to be
crystallized (i.e., diamond).

It’s the mark of a responsible, down-to-earth scientist to go on for pages with formulae and talk of pulsars before wrapping up with, “So, yes, in conclusion, we’re pretty darn certain we’ve found an entire planet made of diamond out there.” Kudos.

"O hai, I iz glowin."

2. “…Those cats that glow in the dark?” Truthfully, the coolest nerdiest thing about these cats isn’t the fact that they glow. Scientists at the Mayo Clinic have designed these cats to produce the monkey version of an enzyme that protects their cells from being infected with FIV, the cat version of HIV (which commonly leads to AIDS in humans). The green color is just a tool that’s been added to track with the monkey gene and make it easier to see whether the kittens of these cats inherit the gene (they do).

Well, I know what would be on the Christmas lists of 8-year-old girls everywhere…if 8-year-old girls stayed on top of disease research.

3. “…Those gamers who outsmarted scientists?” See, you don’t always need some fancy-pants degree to make a newsworthy breakthrough (although, 99.99999% of the time you do, so stay in school, kids). Briefly, the back-story here is that in order for the AIDS virus to do its dirty work and propagate itself inside someone, it needs to use an enzyme called a protease. Scientists would love to inhibit this enzyme, but to inhibit it they need the structure, and (until now) they just couldn’t figure the structure out. Enter the team of nerds gamers who play FoldIt, an online game for people to help science by predicting how proteins will fold (a really, really hard thing to do in most cases). The models created by the gamers were sufficiently accurate that researchers could determine the structure of the protease enzyme and even guess at where to target it with drugs.

More useful than Angry Birds...

Seriously, we need more games like that one.

4. “…That autistic ape?” First off, I’m never happy about disease in a human or an animal, but Teco the autistic bonobo is something of an awesome find for scientists who have been eluded by the mechanism of autism for years. Oh, and Teco is adorable:

For some reason, maybe because of his difficult birth or maybe because of his genetics, Teco shows many of the symptoms of autism that we see in human children: aversion to physical contact, avoidance of eye contact, fixation on shiny things, trouble with limb coordination, and more interest in objects than in his family. As mentioned, Teco is a bonobo, and bonobos are essentially a type of chimpanzee, which could make Teco a very near-human case study of autism. His genetics, studies of which are going on right now, have the potential to enlighten us about the extremely complex genetics of autism in humans.

So, hopefully this is enough to at least fill that awkward silence when you run into your boss at the water cooler, if not to make you the nerdy envy of everyone within earshot. Thank us by looking way over there on the right-hand side of your screen and liking us on Facebook (or following us on Twitter, or subscribing to our RSS feed… ).

What nerdy stuff has had you talking lately? I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Stay nerdy.

Bailes M, Bates SD, Bhalerao V, Bhat ND, Burgay M, Burke-Spolaor S, D’Amico N, Johnston S, Keith MJ, Kramer M, Kulkarni SR, Levin L, Lyne AG, Milia S, Possenti A, Spitler L, Stappers B, & van Straten W (2011). Transformation of a Star into a Planet in a Millisecond Pulsar Binary. Science (New York, N.Y.) PMID: 21868629

Wongsrikeao P, Saenz D, Rinkoski T, Otoi T, & Poeschla E (2011). Antiviral restriction factor transgenesis in the domestic cat. Nature methods PMID: 21909101

Cooper S, Khatib F, Treuille A, Barbero J, Lee J, Beenen M, Leaver-Fay A, Baker D, Popović Z, & Players F (2010). Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game. Nature, 466 (7307), 756-60 PMID: 20686574

Dengue fever is a disease that is asymptomatic or mildly flu-like in the majority of people who get infected with the dengue virus. Those people generally live in tropical areas where mosquitoes spread the virus to anywhere between 50 and 100 million people per year, 12,500 to 25,000 of whom die from severe cases of the disease. In the past few decades, dengue infections have increased dramatically, hypothetically due to global warming and population growth, among other factors.

As you can see on the map above, as of 2006 the southeast coast of the U.S. harbored a species of mosquito able to transmit dengue (cyan), but did not have incidences of the actual dengue virus (red). Fast forward just a few years and the Florida Keys are now seeing cases of dengue fever recurring in the summertime, and the state is worried about the spread of this potentially fatal disease that has no drug or vaccine against it.

Scientists from a British company called Oxitec spoke with NPR after being contacted by Florida health officials because, fascinatingly, Oxitec specializes in developing genetically modified bugs to wipe out other ones that may be killing crops or, in this case, spreading disease. Oxitec has designed sterile male mosquitoes that, when released into a given environment, mate with the females and generate offspring programmed to die. A test of these “GM” (genetically modified) mosquitoes in the Cayman Islands lowered the local mosquito population an astounding 80%.

On the surface, it sounds miraculous that the mosquito population of south Florida could potentially be killed off. I know what it’s like to live there and be tormented by the pests, and the worst I ever got were itchy bumps, not dengue fever. But…as early as elementary school I learned about the food chain, and I know mosquitoes in Florida serve as a huge source of food for many other organisms (e.g., fish, birds, and other insects). A representative from the British non-profit GeneWatch, whose purpose is to monitor genetic technologies, has concerns along those lines and even suggests that other disease-carrying animals could spread new outbreaks in the absence of mosquitoes.

Either way, I think extensive testing and modeling of genetically modified pest control should be done before releasing scientifically altered animals en masse into an any ecosystem. Although, because there is still much governmental debate about how best to regulate the use of genetically modified organisms as environmental tools, Oxitec’s mosquitoes probably won’t be released into the Keys this year. So, my south Florida friends, despite this post’s title, don’t throw out that bug spray just yet.