Grade 8 student's antibiotics work earns science fair gold

Abstract:

This project is about isolation of filamentous bacteria from soil and experimented how they are useful to humans. We isolated 10 bacteria and tested for bacterial killing activity and protease enzyme production. Four isolates were killing test bacteria, the chemical produced from this isolate can be further developed as an antibiotic. Few isolates were also found producing protease enzyme, can be used in detergent industries.

A P.E.I. national science fair winner has found that some micro-organisms in soil can help fight against two common infections.

Shruthi Bandi of Queen Charlotte School in Charlottetown won gold at the Canada-Wide Science Fair for her project on antibiotics. (Lindsay Carroll)

Shruthi Bandi, a grade 8 student from Queen Charlotte Intermediate, recently won gold in the junior division of the national science fair. Bandi tested a number of bacteria found in soil against Staph infections and Candida infections, and found some to be effective at fighting them.

"Everyone thinks micro-organisms are bad and they cause diseases, but I wanted to prove that micro-organisms are actually really good and they help fight diseases," said Bandi.

"I found that one of my isolates was able to fight against Staphylococcus aureus and two of my other isolates were able to fight against Candida albicans. I want to continue this experiment further because the results are really intriguing. So it would be cool to develop a drug or medicine that could fight against Staphylococcus aureus."

The bacteria Staphylococcus aureus causes what is commonly known as a staph infection. Candida albicans is a yeast infection.

Bandi also took home $4,000 along with her gold medal from the National science fair.

He's a cold-blooded mass-murdering clown

It was his greatest role that came at the greatest personal cost.

And now fans have been given insight into just how Heath Ledger became immersed into the dark world of the Joker.

While his official cause of death was an accidental overdose many have always believed the Australian actor struggled after he created his Batman villain.

It’s been five years since his tragic death, but Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker in “The Dark Knight” remains one of Hollywood’s most memorable, chilling villains ever to hit the big screen. Ledger prepared for the role by “reading all the comic books I could that were relevant to the script and then just closing my eyes and meditating on it,” he told Empire in 2007. “I sat around in a hotel room in London for about a month, locked myself away, formed a little diary and experimented with voices — it was important to try to find a somewhat iconic voice and laugh. I ended up landing more in the realm of a psychopath — someone with very little to no conscience towards his acts. He’s just an absolute sociopath, a cold-blooded, mass-murdering clown, and Chris has given me free rein. Which is fun, because there are no real boundaries to what The Joker would say or do. Nothing intimidates him, and everything is a big joke”

Video footage of that diary has emerged, thanks to Reddit, from a German documentary show called “Too Young To Die.” The show interviewed the actor’s father, Kim Ledger, on an episode about the late star, who shared the diary.

The diary provides a disturbing glimpse into the psyche of the Joker, holding clippings from Batman comics, pictures from Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange,” playing cards, pictures of clowns and more. The video, in French, has been translated to English via YouTube:

This is the Joker’s diary. In order to inhabit his character, he locked himself up in a hotel room for weeks. He would do that. He liked to dive into his characters, but this time he really took it up a notch.

The hospital scene is interesting because when he was a kid, his sister Kate liked to dress him up as a nurse. He was really funny like that. He also was in the movie. This is a make-up test which was done eight months before. Before the end of the shooting he wrote ‘bye bye’ on the back of the page. It was hard to see this.

Sources:

Heath Ledger's father reveals dead actor's 'Joker diary' written during The Dark Knight

via Dailymail

Scientists have confirmed today that Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons, has a watery ocean

Earth is not the only orb with oceans. In 2005 Cassini, an American spacecraft, saw plumes of water shooting into space from cracks in the icy surface of Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons (see picture).

Courtesy NASA/JPL/SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE

Enceladus is the sixth-largest of the moons of Saturn, with a mean radius of 252 km (156 miles). In 2005, the Cassini spacecraft spotted what appeared to be plumes of water shooting into space from cracks in the icy surface of Enceladus. The only reasonable explanation would be that the moon has an ocean of liquid water under the ice. Now, a team led by Luciano Iess of theUniversity of Rome confirmed that the ocean exists, and also showed that, like Earth’s, it doesn’t cover the entire surface.

But how could a salty liquid ocean exist, under ice, in Saturn’s area – so far away from the Sun? The likely cause is gravity: as the moon moves around Saturn, tidal forces from the planet and the other moons flex and bend the core of the planet, creating friction – therefore heat. This melts the ice, maintaining a liquid ocean.

Gravitational measurements made by the Cassini spacecraft revealed that a 10km-deep ocean of water, larger than Lake Superior, lurks beneath the icy surface of Enceladus at the moon’s south pole; the liquid ocean reduces the volume of the southern hemisphere, so judging by the larger volume of the northern hemisphere, it’s likely that the ocean can only be found in the southern areas.

David Stevenson, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said the body of water was so large it “may extend halfway or more towards the equator in every direction. It might even extend all the way to the north.”

So what does this mean? Is it far fetched to think that Enceladus could host life? No, not really. There are clear indications that it is habitable – the temperature is right, you get liquid water, and you get some important chemical elements for life, so Enceladus might be the perfect place to look for life (probably microscopic life).

“The question is what conditions do you need to form life and, of course, we don’t know what temperature the ocean is today, nor do we know what it was back in the geological past. But it’s conceivable that it was warm enough, with circulation of water coming from the silicate core as well, to allow life to form even if today that ocean is maintained by antifreeze and is slightly below the freezing point,” said Jonathan Lunine, a member of the team at Cornell University in New York. The antifreeze in question is salt, which reduces the temperature at which water freezes.

Enceladus is not the only moon which sports a liquid water the ice: we’ve written several articles about Europa, a moon of Saturn, and how promising it is. Europa has a more extensive, global ocean under the surface – it is regarded by many as the most likely place to host life in our solar system (bar Earth). But Enceladus also has researchers rubbing their hands due to its vapour plumesfrom the south pole which also contain organic molecules – possible, but not clear signs of life.

To me, the next step here is to establish permanent satellites around Europa and Enceladus, and gather as much geological information as possible, and in time (why not?) land a rover there. The main problem, is, of course, the funding.

Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at Nasa’s Ames Research Centre in California, said:

“There are now several lines of evidence – the geysers, the plume chemistry, and now gravity – that indicate a substantial body of liquid water. For astrobiology this is confirmation of what we expected and is good news. My one view is that Enceladus should be the priority.”

An artist’s impression of the interior of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Credits: Nasa/JPL-Caltech.

Dr Iess describes, in a paper in Science, how his team mapped Enceladus’s gravity by tracking Cassini’s orbit. The moon’s southern hemisphere is less massive than it would be were there no ocean, but its northern hemisphere is not. So the ocean covers only the southern part of the moon.

Reference: Underground Ocean Makes This Saturn Moon a Top Bet for Extraterrestrial Life
                    Scientists have confirmed today that Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons, has a watery ocean

Ship noise stresses right whales

An experiment on the ocean which was conducted accidentally in the middle of the shipping silence after September, 2011 has shown the first direct link between aquatic noise and stress in whales, researchers reported.

The results indicated that a drop in a hormone related to stress, was found in whales when a reduction in ocean noise occurred that followed a near-standstill in ship traffic, due to security concerns following the attacks.

Photo credits: Smithsonian

The research indicates that whales and other aquatic life that communicate by sound and travel can be harmed by the noise. This research leads to more research and eventually can influence future ocean traffic and development, said New England Aquarium scientist Rosalind Rolland, the report's lead author.

"This is definitely a very important piece in the puzzle that lends credence to the idea that, yes, we potentially have a problem out there and we need to learn a lot more about it," Rolland said.

The report is based on data combined from two unrelated experiments in Canada's Bay of Fundy that happened to be occurring simultaneously. One experiment involved acoustic recordings of right whales; the other involved the collection of whale feces samples, which contained hormones related to stress.

It wasn't until 2009 that Rolland realized the information existed for the analysis, published Wednesday in the British journal Proceedings of The Royal Society B.

"Here is the first solid piece of evidence that says there's a link between noise level and stress," said Christopher Clark, director of the bioacoustics research program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, who was not a paper co-author. Clark noted that stress has long been related to longevity, reproduction, disease and other major health indicators in whales.

There's no international standard for ocean noise levels and it is very difficult to know what kinds of problems it causes, Rolland said.

The use of military sonar at sea has been one source of tension between governments and environmentalists, who assert that such sounds kill whales and other aquatic life.

The Bay of Fundy is predominantly bordered by the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Rolland was there in September 2001, taking right whale fecal samples in the middle of a study on the health and reproduction of the endangered North Atlantic right whale.

She remembered getting word at the waterfront of the terror attacks, then seeing her crew in tears as they watched the coverage. It was a brilliant day, and after a while, the crew decided to go on with their work, as a measure of defiance and also because the bay was "calming for the soul," Rolland said.

"It's like our cathedral," she said. "It's a beautiful place."

That day and those following were like a primal ocean scene, Rolland said. "There was nobody out there except for us and the whales."

Around the same time, another researcher, Susan Parks, was getting acoustic recordings on mothers and their calves for research on the social behavior of the whales.

The information didn't come together until late 2009, when Rolland started researching stress and underwater noise to prepare for a workshop organized by the Office of Naval Research. She realized Parks had four days of sound recordings from the bay, two days before and two days after Sept. 11, and she had five years of data on stress hormone levels for the whales that included that time.

A hunch, and then quick analysis by Rolland, showed a correlation between a drop in sound and the drop in whale stress hormone levels. The naval office eventually agreed to fund the work that led to the paper, she said.

The more rigorous analysis showed a significant decrease in background noise in the bay post-Sept. 11, including a drop in the low frequency sounds that ships emit and which the whales use to communicate.

Scientists compared the stress hormone levels in the whale feces during the five-year period and found them to be markedly lower only during the time when ship traffic was down immediately after 9/11.

Rolland said provision of specific stipulations come with any study done accidently. A study that has been planned would have had more data related to noise and hormones. This study apparently can't be repeated. And it's also imprecise how much chronic stress the whales can take from noise before the population is affected, largely because it's impossible to conduct controlled experiments on 50 ton animals.

But even with the provision of specific stipulations, Rolland said, "It's pretty good evidence. We have no other explanation for these findings."

Journal Reference:

1.     R. M. Rolland, S. E. Parks, K. E. Hunt, M. Castellote, P. J. Corkeron, D. P. Nowacek, S. K. Wasser, S. D. Kraus. Evidence that ship noise increases stress in right whales. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2012; DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2011.2429

SOURCES: 

Ship Noise Boosts Stress in Whales

Hear This: Ship Noise Stresses Whales

Candle clock

A candle clock is a thin candle with consistently spaced markings (usually with numbers), that when burned, indicate the passage of periods of time. While no longer used today, candle clocks provided an effective way to tell time indoors, at night, or on a cloudy day. A candle clock could be easily transformed into a timer by sticking a heavy nail into the candle at the mark indicating the desired interval. When the wax surrounding the nail melts, the nail clatters onto a plate below.

It is unknown where and when candle clocks were first used. The earliest reference to their use occurs in a Chinese poem by You Jiangu (520 CE). Here, the graduated candle supplied a means of determining time at night. Similar candles were used in Japan until the early 10th century.

You Jiangu's device consisted of six candles made from 72 pennyweights of wax, each being 12 inches high, of uniform thickness, and divided into 12 sections each of one inch. Each candle burned away completely in four hours, making each marking 20 minutes. The candles were placed for protection inside cases made of a wooden frame with transparent horn panels in the sides. Similar methods of measuring time were used in medieval churches and earlier, famously by King Alfred the Great of England, first by counting the number of candles of a specific size burnt, and later by use of a graduated candle.

Al-Jazari

The most sophisticated candle clocks known to date, however, were those of Al-Jazari in 1206.^[1] It included a dial to display the time and, for the first time, employed a bayonet fitting, a fastening mechanism still used in modern times.^[2] Donald Routledge Hill described one of al-Jazari's candle clocks as follows:

The candle, whose rate of burning was known, bore against the underside of the cap, and its wick passed through the hole. Wax collected in the indentation and could be removed periodically so that it did not interfere with steady burning. The bottom of the candle rested in a shallow dish that had a ring on its side connected through pulleys to a counterweight. As the candle burned away, the weight pushed it upward at a constant speed. The automata were operated from the dish at the bottom of the candle.^[1]

References

Turner, Anthony J. The Time Museum, Volume I, Time Measuring Instruments; Part 3, Water-clocks, Sand-glasses, Fire-clocks

1. Donald Routledge Hill, "Mechanical Engineering in the Medieval Near East", Scientific American, May 1991, pp. 64-9 (cf. Donald Routledge Hill, Mechanical Engineering)
2. Ancient Discoveries, Episode 12: Machines of the East, History Channel, retrieved 2008-09-07

The bird and the bees

Forget about man and his dog. A small brown bird called the honeyguide lays claim to one of the oldest relationships between humans and animals, says Mark D Anderson.

SPOTTING THE HONEYS. The male greater honeyguide is identified by its pink bill, black throat and white ear patches. The female has no bold facial markings and she has a blackish bill.

Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Aves
Order:	Piciformes
Family:	Indicatoridae Swainson, 1837

In the old days, people would follow a honeyguide to a wild bee nest, where they would smoke out the bees and rob the nest. The bird’s reward for leading humans to honey would be a feast of beeswax and bee larvae. Scientists suggest that this relationship goes back to prehistoric times when we all still had to forage for our sugar fix. In modern times, honey­guides are still so tuned in to human behaviour that they will even attempt to guide boats and motor vehicles to bee nests.The honeyguide is the only bird species able to digest beeswax, and it has a tough skin to protect it against bee stings.

Honey, I’m here…
If you’re in the bush and notice a small brown bird chattering away to attract your attention and then flying ahead of you, only to land on a nearby bush, you may well have met a greater honeyguide (the one species in South Africa known to interact with humans in this way). Once the bird has got your attention, it will flick its tail, fly to the next bush and wait for you to follow, gradually leading you to a bee nest.

Honey hex
In African folklore there’s a belief that if you fail to reward the honeyguide, it will bring misfortune upon your head, and next time it will show you the way to a black mamba instead of a sweet treat.

Honey who? 
In Kenya, the Boran people still actively use the honeyguide to find honey. The Boran are, however, gradually being excluded from game reserves, leading some scientists to argue that people follow­ing this tradition should be allowed to collect wild honey just to keep this ancient relationship going.

Honeyguides and honey badgers
There is a popular fallacy that honey badgers (and perhaps baboons and mongooses) are also guided to beehives by greater honeyguides. The idea came from early traveller and naturalist Anders Sparrman, who wrote about this in 1785 based on what he had been told. But in the more than 200 years since, no biologist or naturalist has observed this behaviour. So keep your camera and notebook handy – you could be the first person to document teamwork between this bird and an animal other than humans.

References:

• Friedmann, Herbert (1955). The Honeyguides. U.S. National Museum (Bulletin 208).
• Short, Lester, and Jennifer Horne (2002). Toucans, Barbets and Honeyguides. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-854666-1.

Videos:

• YouTube Video: HONEY GUIDE BIRD Guiding ratel/honey badger to a beehive
• YouTube Video: Honey Guide Bird (Amazing Partnership) Guiding humans to Beehive
• YouTube Video: BBC Talking to Strangers: honey birds
• YouTube Video: Lesser Honeyguide (Indicator minor)

THE GREAT GREEN WALL OF AFRICA

The Great Green Wall initiative is a pan-African proposal to “green” the continent from west to east in order to battle desertification.  It aims at tackling poverty and the degradation of soils in the Sahel-Saharan region, focusing on a strip of land of 15 km (9 mi) wide and 7,500 km (4,750 mi) long from Dakar to Djibouti.  

Populations in Sahelian Africa are among the poorest and most vulnerable to climatic variability and land degradation.  They depend heavily on healthy ecosystems for rainfed agriculture, fisheries, and livestock management to sustain their livelihoods.  These constitute the primary sectors of employment in the region and generate at least 40 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in most of the countries.  Additionally, the ecosystem provides much needed livelihood products, such as fuelwood and bushmeat.  Unfortunately, increasing population pressures on food, fodder, and fuelwood in a vulnerable environment have deteriorating impacts on natural resources, notably vegetation cover.  Climate variability along with frequent droughts and poorly managed land and water resources have caused rivers and lakes to dry up and contribute to increased soil erosion. 

The vision of a great green wall to combat ecological degradation was conceived in 2005 by the former President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, and the idea was strongly supported by President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal. The vision evolved into an integrated ecosystem management approach in January 2007, when the African Union adopted declaration 137 VIII, approving the “Decision on the Implementation of the Green Wall for the Sahara Initiative”. In June 2010, Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Sudan signed a convention in Ndjamena, Chad, to create the Great Green Wall (GGW) Agency and nominate a secretary to further develop the initiative. 

The participating countries hope that by linking national-level efforts across borders, they will tackle policy, investment, and institutional barriers that exacerbate the effects of climate change and variability, leading to desertification and deterioration of the environment and natural resources and the risk of conflicts between communities. International Colloquiums are held to discuss possible barriers as well as share available knowledge on the vegetal species, systems of development, and GGW monitoring updates1.

The GEF emulates the spirit of collaboration by allowing participating GGW countries to prioritize which projects they want to implement, in conjunction with GEF agencies and their partners.  They may “develop one or several projects in the context of this program and assign some or all of their financial allocations to the Great Green Wall[1]”.

Progress is apparent especially in the Zinder region of Niger, where tree density has significantly improved since the mid-1980s.  GEF CEO Monique Barbut attributes the success to working with farmers to find technical solutions, particularly long-term land and financial solutions, in order to save the trees.  This form of natural regeneration benefits local communities and the global environment alike by increasing crop yield, improving soil fertility, reducing land erosion, improving fodder availability, diversifying income, cutting wood collection time for women, strengthening resilience to climate change, increasing biodiversity, and much more. 

The Global Environmental Facility (GEF) has granted $100.8 million[2] to the GGW participating countries to expand sustainable land and water management (SLWM) and adaptation in targeted landscapes and in climate vulnerable areas in West African and Sahelian countries.  Each country will design a project based on national-level priorities for GEF and LDCF resources.  The projects will support the following activities

• Expand investment in SLWM technologies to help communities adapt production systems to climate variability, generate income and livelihoods, secure global public goods (such as retention of greenhouse gases, nitrogen fixation, groundwater recharge and biodiversity), and reduce impacts from erosion, drought, and flooding.
• Improve land-use planning, such as at watershed scale (i.e. Nigeria) or local levels (i.e. grazing reserves).
• Improve and apply the information base: climate and water monitoring network improvements, ICT (information communication technology) innovations, institutional cooperation within and across countries, and evidence based policy development

UPDATES: 

The Great Green Wall of the Sahel, still in the planning stages, will span Africa from Senegal to Djibouti in order to reverse desertification of the Sahel eco-system, and will look much like this image of a local re-forestation initiative in Chad.

The initiative will be ongoing, and has garnered the support of several international organisations including the UK's Royal Botanic Gardens, the World Bank, the African Union, and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. Together they have pledged $3 billion and the expertise of their botanists for its advancement.

"Examples of success [so far] include more than 50,000 acres of trees planted in Senegal,” says Ryan Schleeter at National Geographic. "Most of these are the acacia species Senegalia senegal, which has economic value for the commodity it produces, gum arabic. (Gum arabic is primarily used as a food additive.) A small portion of the trees are also fruit-bearing, which, when mature, will help combat the high levels of malnutrition in the country’s rural interior.”

Even more dramatic is the project’s potential social impact, says Schleeter. By providing better quality land and more opportunities to earn an income from cultivating it, the Great Green Wall will open up thousands of job opportunities to the local population.

References:

An African partnership to tackle desertification and land degradation 

Senegal begins planting the Great Green Wall against climate change