Corante: technology, business, media, law, and culture news from the blogosphere
OUR PUBLICATIONS:
Corante is a trusted, unbiased source on technology, business, law, science, and culture that’s authored by leading commentators and thinkers in their respective fields. Corante also produces premium conferences and publications that help decision-makers better understand their industries and the world around them.
Corante Blogs
Corante Blogs examine, through the eyes of leading observers, analysts, thinkers, and doers, critical themes and memes in technology, business, law, science, and culture.
Vin Crosbie, on the challenges, financial and otherwise, that newspaper publishers are facing: "The real problem, Mr. Newspaperman, isn't that your content isn't online or isn't online with multimedia. It's your content. Specifically, it's what you report, which stories you publish, and how you publish them to people, who, by the way, have very different individual interests. The problem is the content you're giving them, stupid; not the platform its on."
by Vin Crosbie in Rebuilding Media
There's a problem in the drug industry that people have recognized for some years, but we're not that much closer to dealing with it than we were then. We keep coming up with these technologies and techniques which seem as if they might be able to help us with some of our nastiest problems - I'm talking about genomics in all its guises, and metabolic profiling, and naturally the various high-throughput screening platforms, and others. But whether these are helping or not (and opinions sure do vary), one thing that they all have in common is that they generate enormous heaps of data.
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline
Now that the Web labor market is saturated and Web design a static profession, it's not surprising that 'user experience' designers and researchers who've spent their careers online are looking for new worlds to conquer. Some are returning to the “old media” as directors and producers. More are now doing offline consulting (service experience design, social policy design, exhibition design, and so on) under the 'user experience' aegis. They argue that the lessons they've learned on the Web can be applied to phenomena in the physical and social worlds. But there are enormous differences...
by Bob Jacobson in Total Experience
Clay Shirky, in deconstructing Second Life hype: "Second Life is heading towards two million users. Except it isn’t, really... I suspect Second Life is largely a 'Try Me' virus, where reports of a strange and wonderful new thing draw the masses to log in and try it, but whose ability to retain anything but a fraction of those users is limited. The pattern of a Try Me virus is a rapid spread of first time users, most of whom drop out quickly, with most of the dropouts becoming immune to later use."
by Clay Shirky in Many-to-Many
Over the last few years we've seen old barriers to creativity coming down, one after the other. New technologies and services makes it trivial to publish text, whether by blog or by print-on-demand. Digital photography has democratised a previously expensive hobby. And we're seeing the barriers to movie-making crumble, with affordable high-quality cameras and video hosting provided by YouTube or Google Video and their ilk... Music making has long been easy for anyone to engage in, but technology has made high-quality recording possible without specialised equipment, and the internet has revolutionised distribution, drastically disintermediating the music industry... What's left? Software maybe? Or maybe not."
by Suw Charman in Strange Attractor
Derek Lowe on the news that the Nobel Prize for medicine has gone to Craig Mello and Andrew Fire for their breakthrough work: "RNA interference is probably going to have a long climb before it starts curing many diseases, because many of those problems are even tougher than usual in its case. That doesn't take away from the discovery, though, any more than the complications of off-target effects take away from it when you talk about RNAi's research uses in cell culture. The fact that RNA interference is trickier than it first looked, in vivo or in vitro, is only to be expected. What breakthrough isn't?"
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline
Andrew Phelps: "Recently my WoW guild has been having a bit of a debate on the merits of Player-vs.-Player (PvP) within Azeroth. My personal opinion on this is that PvP has its merits, and can be incredible fun, but the system within WoW is horridly, horribly broken. It takes into account the concept of the battle, but battle without consequence, without emotive context, and most importantly, without honor..."
From later in the piece: "When I talk about this with people (thus far anyway) I typically get one of two responses, either 'yeah, right on!' or 'hey, it’s war, and war isn’t honorable – grow the hell up'. There is a lot to be said for that argument – but the problem is that war in the real historical world has very different constraints that are utterly absent from fantasized worlds..."
by Andrew Phelps in Got Game
Derek Lowe: "So, you're developing a drug candidate. You've settled on what looks like a good compound - it has the activity you want in your mouse model of the disease, it's not too hard to make, and it's not toxic. Everything looks fine. Except. . .one slight problem. Although the compound has good blood levels in the mouse and in the dog, in rats it's terrible. For some reason, it just doesn't get up there. Probably some foul metabolic pathway peculiar to rats (whose innards are adapted, after all, for dealing with every kind of garbage that comes along). So, is this a problem?.."
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline
Bob Jacobson, on shopping at his local Albertsons supermarket where he had "one of the worst customer experiences" of his life: "Say what you will about the Safeway chain or the Birkenstock billionaires who charge through the roof for Whole Foods' organic fare, they know how to create shopping environments that create a more pleasurable experience, at its best (as at Whole Foods) quite enjoyable. Even the warehouses like Costco and its smaller counterpart, Smart & Final, do just fine: they have no pretentions, but neither do they dump virtual garbage on the consumer merely to create another trivial revenue stream, all for the sake of promotions in the marketing department..."
by Strange Attractor in Total Experience
Kevin Anderson: "First off, I want to say that I really admire the ambition of the Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free. It is one of the boldest statements made by any media company that participation needs to be central to a radical revamp of traditional content strategies... It is, therfore, not hugely surprising to find that Comment is Free is having a few teething troubles..."
by Kevin Anderson in strange
Corante Developments
Here you will find the latest news from Corante including updates on upcoming events, new initiatives, product and publication launches, and more.
It was with shock that I returned home from a night out last night to hear the news of Russell's passing. How terribly, terribly sad. Most of all for him, as he'd seemed buoyant, healthier, and content when I'd last seen him several months ago when he was in town - he was happy that work was busy and rewarding and was having fun with it but most of all was thrilled about how things were going with his girlfriend, Ellen.
I've known Russ for what seems like ages now (in a good way) though in fact it's only been about six or seven years since the early days of "commercial" blogging when he started working on various projects at and around Corante. He was a diligent, committed, and prolific journalist who had impressively and more ably than others been able to make the transition from the old-school way of doing things to the new. He had his quirks, as we all do, but I greatly valued that he was good-natured, collegial, reliable, quick to adopt, trustworthy, eager to learn, and earnest in his interest in helping others better understand what he wrote about.
He was also, it should be said, a kind and thoughtful soul and it was the rare conversation in which he didn't ask, with sincerity, about what he knew of my life, e.g. our new babe, and we didn't talk as seemingly old friends about our lives and respective paths. I can't say I knew him very well, of course, but in our half-dozen get-togethers over the years and dozens of conversations I got a good sense of the man: he cared about learning and sharing and his bearing was earnest and ego-less and we'll miss him for that and more.
We wanted to let you know about a discount to New Comm Forum, the annual event event put on by our friends at the Society for New Communications Research. The conference, which runs from April 22-25, will feature many of the field's leading observers and is an important event for those looking, in the words of SNCR, to "better understand new communications tools, technologies and emerging modes of communication, and their effect on traditional media, professional communications, business, culture and society."
Check out the event's website and, if you're interested in attending, be sure to use the code supplied below for a special discount.
EARLY BIRD PRICING - NOW UNTIL FEB. 15th
NewComm Forum Conference - $995.
Pre-conference or post-conference session - $195.
SNCR Jam only - $75.
REGULAR PRICING - AFTER FEB. 15th
NewComm Forum Conference - $1095.
Pre-conference or post-conference session - $249.
SNCR Jam only - $75.
CORANTE READER DISCOUNTS
NewComm Forum Conference - save an additional $100
Use discount code: NCF08100
Pre-conference or post-conference session - save an additional $45.
Use discount code: NCF0845
We've been remiss in letting you know about two new independent blogs we've helped launch in the past month or so.
The first - the ConversationHub - is a companion blog to Supernova 2007, the latest edition of Kevin Werbach's excellent conference on all things connected. As the conference site says: "Supernova examines the effects of an increasingly connected world on business, life, and public policy. As disparate physical and social networks link with one another, a new societal network is rapidly evolving... The New Network is greater than the sum of its parts. It challenges us to re-create everything from the software and hardware we use...to the business models we employ...to the information and entertainment we encounter...to the ways we work and play."
Visit the ConversationHub and you'll find several dozen leading thinkers and doers, led by a few notable ringleaders, weighing in on the themes and trends of the day in technology and business. We encourage you to tune in - feel free to comment and even suggest topics and ideas for posts.
The second blog - Mobile Messaging 2.0 - convenes about a dozen top observers of the mobile messaging space for an intense discussion of the industry and where it's headed. Among its contributors are leading commentators, journalists and players in the field - tune in and you'll find them touching on topics such as mobile device design, messaging platforms, market pressures, user-generated content, interface design, and much, much more.
Also, if you visit the site, which is sponsored by Airwide Solutions, this week, you'll find live coverage and commentary from Global Messaging 2007, to which several of our contributors have traveled to hear about the latest developments from a broad spectrum of the industry's players and providers.
Be sure to catch the Office 2.0 Conference and hear from and engage with leading thinkers and doers in this exciting new market. Find out more here and be sure to use the code "GLDRK" for a special discount for Corante readers.
Writing about paleontology without illustrations is like directing a movie without a camera. When I wrote my first book, At the Water's Edge, I had the good fortune to join forces with Carl Buell, who brought walking whales and fish with fingers to life. Now he has come to the other side, with a blog of his own, complete with pictures. Check it out.
Getting back home from a Thanksgiving journey full of turkey and queasy toddlers on airplanes, I just noticed that my visit-counter has rolled past the 500,000 mark. I never would have dreamed of such figures when I started this blog, and I just want to take a second to thank everyone who has ever clicked their way to the Loom.
Natural selection is not natural perfection. Time and again, biologists have discovered traits that are both beneficial and harmful. Perhaps the most famous example is the devastating disorder known as sickle-cell anemia. To get sickle-cell anemia, you have to inherit two faulty copies of a gene that helps build hemoglobin, the molecule that traps oxygen in red blood cells. In this condition, hemoglobin can't hold its shape if it's not clamped around oxygen. Without it, the defective hemoglobin collapses into needle-shaped clumps, which then turn the cell itself into a sickle shape. The sickle cells snag in small capillaries, and the blood can no longer supply as much oxygen to the body. People who inherit only one copy of this defective gene can get by on the hemoglobin made by the remaining normal copy. But people who get two copies of the bad gene make nothing but defective hemoglobin, and they're usually dead by the time they're thirty. A person who dies of sickle cell anemia is less likely to pass on the defective gene, and that means that the disease should be exceedingly rare. But it's not--one in 400 American blacks has sickle cell anemia, and one in ten carries a single copy of the defective gene.
In the 1940s, scientists discovered what keeps sickle-cell anemia so common: the defective gene provides protection from malaria. Carrying a single copy of the gene reduces a person's chance of getting severe malaria by a factor of ten. Malaria is caused by a single-celled parasite called Plasmoidum carried by mosquitoes. Normally it feeds on hemoglobin, but a red blood cell deformed by the sickle-cell gene somehow becomes a miserable home for the parasite. The needle-shaped clumps of hemoglobin may be able to spear the parasites, or the deformed cells may not be able to pump in potassium, an element essential to Plasmodium. It's also possible that it is easier for the immune system to recognize infected blood cells when they are deformed by sickle cell anemia.
Malaria wreaks colossal damage in many parts of the world. Today it kills over a million people a year, mostly children, and it has been plaguing our species for thousands of years. Carrying a single copy of the sickle-cell gene boosts the odds that people can have children in malaria-prone regions. Unfortunately, when two people who carry the gene have children together, there's a one-in-four chance that each child will get both copies of the gene. Over many generations, the advantage of having one copy of the gene outweighs the disadvantage of having two—at least in populations that have endured centuries of malaria.
In the decades since the discovery of the sickle-cell trade-off, scientists have discovered that several other defenses to malaria have evolved where the disease is a high risk—in Africa, the Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, and New Guinea. And many of these adaptations come with drawbacks of their own. Now a new study offers evidence of yet another mixed blessing: one defense against malaria may make people prone to alcoholism.
The discovery of this defense sprang up in an unexpected place: on the tongue. In recent years scientists have deciphering the molecular biology of how we taste. They have pinpointed several of the genes that produce receptors on taste bud cells. They've also reconstructed the structure of the receptors, and have even discovered some of the molecules that locked onto them. And scientists have also been reconstructing the evolution of those taste receptors. It turns out that they're the product of a complicated history. Taste receptor genes can get accidentally duplicated, and mutations to the new copies can cause them to grab different molecules. This growing diversity of receptors can let animals perceive a growing diversity of tastes—in some cases tastes of dangerous toxins in foods.
Compared to other primates, humans and chimpanzees have a relatively bad sense of taste—perhaps because we eat meat and fruits, as opposed to leaves and other plant material that's loaded with dangerous foods. But scientists have identified a couple taste receptors that have experienced a significant amount of natural selection in the human lineage. This summer a team of scientists reported the discovery of one of these highly evolved genes, known as TAS2R16. The evidence indicates that the receptor causes a feeling of bitterness in response to compounds called beta-glucopyranosides, which plants and insects produce to protect themselves against predators. If these compounds get into a person's intestines, they produce cyanide as they are broken down. Avoiding beta-glucopyranosides thanks to a bitter taste may keep people healthy, and thus be favored by natural selection. The researchers found that an ancestral version of the receptor was replaced by newer versions on many occasions, beginning over 80,000 years ago. The newer versions produce a nastier taste to the beta-glucopyranosides.
But the researchers discovered a peculiar exception to this rule. Some populations in Africa had unusually high levels of the ancestral version of the gene. These populations also turn out to be at very high risk of malaria.
Why would malaria favor a weaker sense of bitterness? One possibility is that beta-glucopyranosides can fight the parasite that causes the disease. Cyanide isn't just bad for people, but for Plasmodium as well. It can even trigger a sickle-cell-like condition in red blood cells. When malaria poses a major risk, the danger of eating poisons may be offset by their protection against the disease.
TAS2R16's intriguing history prompted scientists to look for other conditions with which it might be associated. Previous research had found a genetic disposition towards alcoholism, although the scientists could only link the diseases to a large chunk of chromosome seven. In a new study in press at the American Journal of Human Genetics, researchers now report that this region contains TAS2R16. The scientists zeroed in on the taste receptor gene, comparing the versions carried by alcoholics and their relatives (2310 people were studied all told).
The researchers discovered that people who carried the low-bitterness version of the gene were at a significantly increased risk of alcoholism. They also found that this gene was rare in European-Americans in their study, but 45% of the African-Americans carried it. Based on these results, the scientists suggest that a weak sense of bitterness not only provided protection against malaria, but also changes the taste of alcohol. Other versions of TAS2R16 may give alcoholic drinks a nasty taste. When these drinks don't taste as bad, it may be easier for people to develop alcoholism. This study by no means slight the complexity of alcoholism--genes probably only account for half of the variation in people's risk, and those genes probably all have their own complex evolutionary history. But it's further evidence of the many evolutionary trade-offs that have shaped our genomes, and our lives.
Back in February I discovered the remarkable work of Australian biologist Bryan Grieg Fry, who has been tracing the evolution of venom. As I wrote in the New York Times, he searched the genomes of snakes for venom genes. He discovered that even non-venomous snakes produce venom. By drawing an evolutionary tree of the venom genes, Fry showed that the common ancestor of living snakes had several kinds of venom, which had evolved through accidental "borrowing" of proteins produced in other parts of the body. Later, these genes duplicated to create a sophisticated cocktail of venoms--a cocktail that varied from one lineage of snakes to another.
As I report tomorrow in the Times, Fry has taken this research the next logical step. He set out to find out when that ancestral venom evolve. In his search, Fry made an astonishing discovery: snakes are 100 million years old, but snake venom is 200 million years old. This conclusion arose from the fact that some lizards produce the same sorts of venom as snakes--including this desert spotted monitor that Fry is posing next to on one of his venom expeditions in the Outback.
I find that these stories make the most sense if I can map them onto an evolutionary tree. Fortunately this study (published online at Nature) comes with a particularly nice one, which I've reprinted here. It shows how snakes are related to lizards, based on a new large-scale study of DNA. Snakes descend from a close common ancestor with monitor lizards, gila monsters, iguanas, and other related species. They're more distantly related to skinks, gekkos, tuataras, and other less well known lizards.
The venomous species did not turn up on random branches of the tree. Instead, they all belong to the same branch, marked on the tree with the name "venom clade." (Clade just means a group of species sharing a common ancestor.) The venoms shared by all of them are marked in red and brown. Red-marked venoms are produced in glands on the top and bottom of the mouth, and brown in the top. Snakes then added on 17 other kinds of venoms. Other lizard clades have venoms of their own, in other marked in yellow. The tree also shows how mouth glands evolved at the same time, beginning as a way to make prey slimey enough to go down the throat to a way to pour venom into a wound.
The story revealed in this tree reveals how a 200-million year old lizard species evolved venom that helped it disable prey long enough to kill them. Over time, new kinds of venom emerged before the common ancestor of living snakes and their close relatives. Snakes later became venom specialists, in some cases evolving a bite that was even fatal to humans and other big animals. At the same time, though, other lizards were acquiring some new venoms of their own, probably as an adaptation to new kinds of prey. It's a process that's going on today, as reflected in different cocktails of venom found in different populations of the same species of lizard.
It will be interesting to see what happens as Fry and others add more branches to this tree. For example, pythons are not known to be venomous. Did they lose venom as they became adept at constrictors? And how did the function of the venoms change with time? A Komodo dragon and a coral snake occupy very different ecological niches, so they need to manipulate their prey in different ways.
Incidentally, I would stress that this discovery does not mean that your pet iguana is going to strike you down tomorrow morning. Lizard venoms are sophisticated, but they typically come in such small doses that they won't cause you any significant harm. And if you do happen to get bit by a Komodo dragon, you'll be able to be distracted from the effects of its venom by the fact that your arm is missing.
Following up on my earlier post, I wanted to relay one more piece of book news. I've been getting some emails over the past couple months inquiring about my book, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea. I wrote it as a companion volume to the 2001 PBS television series, Evolution. Like the series, the book surveys the history and cutting edge of evolutionary biology, from the origin of new species to mass extinctions, from the rise of complex life to the emergence of humans. It also looks at ongoing evolutionary races, whether the competitors are hosts and parasites or members of the opposite sex. It puts evolution in a historical context, showing how Darwin's theory emerged out of the science of his time and how social and political tensions have produced hostility to the notion of evolution today. (More details about the book can be found here.)
The book continued to sell long after the series aired, but recently some people emailed me to complain that they can't find a new copy to buy. The original (heavily illustrated) version indeed went out of print a few months ago, partly due to the cost of all those pictures. But I'm happy to report that HarperCollins will be republishing Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea in fall 2006 with a new introduction in which I'll discuss some of the new scientific and political developments that have occurred over the past four years. I'm glad my publisher has made this decision, because I think the book is more relevant than ever. Now I just have to find some time to write the introduction.
I'll post more information next year when the book is available. In the meantime, back to the science…
My latest book, Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins is now available on Amazon.com, and I think it's getting put on the shelves at bookstores. I've only referred to the book here glancingly from time to time, and I wanted to take a minute now to give Loom readers a sense of the book (and perhaps inspire the sales of a few copies).
From the start of this blog, I've dedicated a lot of space to new discoveries about where we came from. I've written about spectacular new fossils, from Sahelanthropus, the oldest known hominid to the Hobbits (a k a Homo floresiensis), which might have been a distant branch of hominid evolution that survived until just 12,000 years ago. It's also been wonderfully exciting to see studies of the human genome reveal all sorts of fascinating twists and turns in our evolution.
In 2003 I wrote a cover story for Discover about the big questions in human evolution, and before long it evolved into an illustrated, 176-page book published by Smithsonian Books. Here's a brief overview:
Chapter 1: The Clues
I introduce the book, starting off with Charles Darwin's remarkably insightful ideas about human evolution—ideas that came to him without any knowledge of DNA or of hominid fossils.
Chapter 2: A Budding Branch
This chapter looks at the latest evidence for how hominids branched off from other apes. This evidence includes new fossils such as Sahelanthropus as well as insights from comparing human DNA to chimpanzee DNA.
Chapter 3: The Walk Begins
Charles Darwin thought that bipedalism, big brains, and tool use all emerged at the same time in human ancestors. It turns out that he was wrong. Hominids were walking on two legs for millions of years with brains not much bigger than a chimp's. Why they made the transition remains a fascinating puzzle.
Chapter 4: The Toolmakers
Here I tell the story of how our ancestors began making stone tools, looking not just at the ancient tools themselves for clues, but also at the behavior of other apes that might have opened the way to our own technology.
Chapter 5: Becoming Human
This chapter looks at how tall, long-legged hominids emerged about 1.8 million years ago and spread across the Old World, ultimately evolving into species such as Neanderthals and perhaps Homo floresiensis.
Chapter 6: Sapiens
I describe what scientists have learned recently about the emergence of our own species in Africa roughly 200,000 years ago. New discoveries about this crucial time in our evolution—from ancient jewelry to hints of ritual cannibalism--are coming fast and furious these days. Some even had me revising the manuscript to this book at the last minute.
Chapter 7: The Last Wave
Once our species emerged in Africa, it expanded across the rest of the planet, even reaching the New World where no hominid had come before. In this chapter I look at the evidence for how our ancestors spread and the evidence as to why we are now the only species of hominid left on Earth.
Chapter 8: Where Do We Go From Here?
Everyone always wants to know what the future of human evolution will be. There's plenty of evidence that our species has continued to evolve in just the past few thousand years. At the same time, though, the rise of human culture, medicine, and genetic engineering may be sending our species off on an evolutionary trajectory that's impossible to predict.
So if you want a short, sweet, beautifully illustrated introduction to the science of where we come from—or if you're trying to think of a Christmas gift for that cranky uncle who says there's no evidence whatsoever for human evolution—please check out this book!
This story starts in 1987, with the skin of a frog.
Michael Zasloff, a scientist then at NIH, was impressed by how well a frog in his lab recovered from an incision he had made in its skin during an experiment. He kept his frogs in a tank that must have been rife with bacteria that should have turned the incision into a deadly maw of infection. Zasloff wondered if something in the skin of the frog was blocking the bacteria. After months of searching, he found it. The frogs produced an antibiotic radically unlike the sort that doctors prescribed their patients.
Most antibiotics kill bacteria by jamming up their enzymes. The bacteria can no longer copy its DNA or expand its membrane as it grows or do some other task essential to their survival, and they die. Zasloff and his colleagues figured out that the antibiotics in frog skin worked entirely differently. These small molecules were attracted to the positive charge on the surface of many species of bacteria. Once they stuck to the membrane, the frog molecules changed shape, so that they punched a hole through the membrane. The bacteria's innards spilled out of the hole, leading to their death.
The antibiotics from frog skin proved to be just a tiny sampling of a huge natural pharmacy. Antimicrobial peptides, as these molecules are known, can be found in all manner of animals. We humans make a lot of them, both on our skin and in the lining of our guts and lungs. One reason that cystic fibrosis is so devastating seems to be that it monkeys with our ability to make antimicrobial peptides in our lungs. The microbes that swarm into the unprotected tissue cause the lungs to become inflamed, loading them with fluids. Many of the antimicrobial peptides found in one species are not produced by any other animal, and yet they are all remarkably lethal to bacteria.
Zasloff recognized a promising opportunity for inventing a new drug. The science of antibiotics hasn't moved forward much since the 1940s, when penicillin and other drugs were first introduced. These antibiotics, most of which were produced by fungi or bacteria, were miracle drugs at first. They can still clear up all sorts of infections in a manner of days--provided you're infected with a vulnerable strain of bacteria. Within a few years, every antibiotic that has been put on the market has triggered the evolution of resistance. Some bacteria acquire the ability to pump the drugs out, others to change the shape of their enzymes to make them harder to grab, and others do all sorts of other remarkable evolutionary tricks.
Before the antibiotic era, the mutations that help make bacteria resistant to drugs didn't bring a big benefit. In fact, they may have had nasty side-effects, slowing down the growth rate of microbes. As a result, they remained rare. But once bacteria began regularly to face these drugs, the evolutionary balance tipped. People often don't take enough antibiotics to wipe out their infections, allowing bacteria with a little resistance to survive and acquire new mutations. People sick with viruses regularly get antibiotics, even though the treatment is useless. Bacteria also encounter antibiotics in livestock, which get loaded with antibiotics to grow faster. Resistance genes can spread as microbes reproduce, and can get traded between different species. The situation has gotten so bad that scientists are now warning surgeons may soon be operating in conditions not seen since the Civil War, unable to stop bacteria that get into open wounds.
The secret of frog skin promised a solution to this disaster. A drug based on antimicrobial peptides might be able to wipe out bacteria that had evolved resistance to other drugs. And even more exciting was the possibility that these new antibiotics might be resistance-proof. Bacteria might theoretically able to evolve resistance to antimicrobial peptides by changing the charge on their surface so that the molecules wouldn't be attracted. But that wouldn't be just a tweak to an enzyme or some other series of small changes: it would be a fundamental alteration of the beast. Experiments seemed to back up this hunch. Some scientists tried to produce resistant bacteria by randomly mutating their genes and then seeing whether any mutants could survive a dose of antimicrobial peptides. No luck.
But a Canadian evolutionary biologist named Graham Bell suspected that bacteria--and their evolutionary potential--might be more powerful than others thought. Michael Zasloff for one didn't think so. But as a good scientist, he was willing to put his hypothesis to the test. Remarkably, it failed.
The researchers began by exposing bacteria to low levels of antimicrobial peptides. They would then use a few of the survivors to start a new colony and then expose the bacteria to slightly higher levels of the poison. As they report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 30 out of 32 colonies evolved to be resistant to a full does of antimicrobial peptides. It took only about 600 generations for them to do the impossible.
The new paper doesn't offer any evidence for what the evolved bacteria are doing to escape antimicrobial peptides. It is hard to pinpoint mutations that produce new traits, and even harder to figure out exactly how they change the workings of a microbe. So we may have to wait to learn the trick that bacteria have discovered. But the results are enough to raise serious concerns about the future of antimicrobial peptides. People who take full doses of the drugs might wipe out all the bacteria infecting them, but microbes that are exposed to low levels--in people who don't take full prescriptions, in animals, or even in the environment--could evolve resistance. As the bacteria became stronger, they would be able withstand higher doses. They might gradually invade a new ecological niche: the world of full-strength antimicrobial peptides.
The new research shows yet again that it's pointless to rely on personal incredulity to understand the workings of evolution, despite what some creationists may claim. But it also reveals a paradox: if resistance can emerge so easily, why are bacteria susceptible to antimicrobial peptides in nature? Clues to the answer lie in the evolutionary history of the peptides themselves. Scientists have compared peptides to figure out how they evolved from common ancestors. The peptides have been evolving at high speed for millions of years. Ancient genes were accidentally duplicated, and mutated so that they produced molecules with different structures. But different parts of the genes evolved at different rates. Each gene for an antimicrobial peptide contains a signal sequence that acts like a mailing label: once the DNA code of the gene is translated into a protein, the signal sequence tells a cell where the protein should go. The signal sequence in antimicrobial peptides barely changes over hundreds of millions of years--presumably because all of these molecules need to go to the same place, out of the cell. But the portion of the gene that codes the bacteria-fighting end of the protein has changed drastically over time. In fact, some research even suggests that this part of the gene is more prone to mutating than typical DNA.
This pattern suggests that antimicrobial peptides are effective only if they are continually reinvented. When a population of frogs begins to colonize a new habitat, for example, they may encounter new microbes. Their old antimicrobial peptides may not be very effective against these pathogens, but they can rapidly evolve new ones. But even if animals stay put, they may evolve new peptides. That's because pathogens can evolve the ability to knock out these weapons. Certain bacteria, for example, can produce enzymes that neutralize antimicrobial peptides. Hosts that can evolve new peptides that can't be knocked out so easily may be more likely to survive. And so the arms race continues.
There's another lesson for the drug industry in the evolution of these molecules. Not only have animals repeatedly experimented with new versions, but they never rely on just one. Each species may produce ten different kinds of antimicrobial peptides, and the molecules are often most effective in combination (for reasons scientists don't yet understand). By using a range of different peptides at once, animals may thwart the evolution of resistance, because bacteria never get intensely exposed to a single drug.
It would be absurd to model man-made antimicrobial peptides too closely on natural ones. After all, natural selection produces remarkable antibiotics only through the different levels of success of different genes. Some animals die, in other words, and some don't. But it does offer some guidance. Just because microbes can evolve resistance to antimicrobial peptides doesn't necessarily mean they will if these drugs enter the marketplace. If doctors use them sparingly, combine several kinds of antimicrobial peptides, and continue to invest in new versions (like this extremely powerful one from a mushroom reported by Zasloff in October), they may be able to stay one step ahead of the bacteria. We just need to face evolution with our eyes open.
Update: link to Bell and Zasloff paper fixed, I hope.
As a father of two dawn-loving children I don't get as much sleep as I used to, which makes me wonder sometimes why I crave it so much. A number of scientists who share my curiosity have turned to sleeping animals to find an answer. Sleep appears to be an ancient behavior, perhaps 600 million years old or older. But it may not exist "for" any one purpose. Instead, sleep can serve many functions, as animals are shaped by evolutionary tradeoffs. I've written an article about the evolution of sleep for tomorrow's New York Times where you can read more. (And for those interested in some of the the gorey technical details, here's an interesting new review in Nature that's free.)
The insects scandalously embracing in this picture are decorated crickets (Grylllodes sigillatus), which can be found in the southwestern United States, among other places. The droplet on the male's tail is--for want of a better word--a gift. After producing this glob he sticks it onto the package of sperm he places on the female. After the crickets are finished with their encounter, the female will grab the gift and snack on it.
In an age when penguins can become role models for traditional family values, some people may be tempted to celebrate the decorated cricket as everything a gentleman should be. But before anyone gets carried off on the vapors of chivalry, it pays to take a closer look at those gifts.
Biologists have puzzled over gifts for many years. Decorated crickets are far from the only animals who give them--many species (particularly insects and spiders) are gift-givers as well. Given the effort that males put into giving gifts, there must be some advantage to them. Otherwise, giftless males would be much more successful at reproducing, wiping away the genes that are associated with presenting gifts.
Scientists who study gifts generally agree that the evolution is driven by how animals mate. In many species, females appear to have some control over which males will successfully fertilize their eggs. It may pay for females to make these sorts of judgments, since some males may have genes that will help her offspring survive. In crickets, female choice can be a pretty simple procedure. Once a male cricket places a sperm package on the female, the sperm then make their way into her reproductive tract. Female crickets can cut down the chances that a male will fertilize her eggs simply by plucking the sperm package off her body. On the other hand, females can boost the odds by leaving the sperm package alone, or mating several times with the same male.
As females evolve the power to choose, natural selection may favor males that can influence their choices. And gift-giving, it turns out, is one way to do just that. The bigger a male's gift, the more likely his sperm will be the one that gets to fertilize a female's eggs. Some scientists have suggested that big gifts sway females because they must contain nutrients or some other important benefit. Females who prefer bigger gifts get more energy and can have more offspring than females who don't.
But the timing of cricket courtship is all wrong for this explanation. Males give their gifts to females before they mate, and female make their choice among which sperm to use afterwards. Some scientists have proposed an alternative explanation for the gifts: they are a way that males can manipulate females to produce more of their own offspring.
This idea emerged from research in the late 1990s on fruit flies. Even after sperm have entered a female fruit fly's body, she can influence which male will become the father of her eggs. Brett Holland and William Rice demonstrated that male fruit flies respond by injecting chemicals along with their sperm that act like antiaphrodisiacs, making it less likely that females will mate again soon.
While this injection made it more likely males would father flies, it has nasty side-effects on the females. Females who get more of these toxins die sooner than others. Females in turn have evolve resistance to these toxic chemicals. While it's hard to see this tug-of-war in a normal population of flies, Holland and Rice figured out experiments to uncover it. In one experiment, they bred flies so that they only mated monogamously. That got rid of the competition between males, and their injections became less toxic. At the same time, the females in the experiment lost their resistance. In essence, Holland and Rice figured out how to run the arms race between the sexes in reverse.
Scott Sakaluk of Illinois State University and his colleagues wondered if decorated crickets also followed this "chase-away model" of sexual selection. Perhaps the gifts somehow interfered with female choice. The females ate them not because they were valuable food, but because they were just deceptively attractive. And perhaps the females had evolved to resist the gifts, in ways that might be hard to see from ordinary encounters between decorated crickets.
Scientists have done only a little research on the chemistry of the gifts, but what they've found out certainly supports the chase-away model. The gifts contain a lot of free amino acids, which give off an odor that insects may use to recognize good food. But the gifts turn out to have very few of the kinds of amino acids that are actually essential for an insect's survival. It's cricket junk food--engineered through evolution to exploit a "sensory bias" as it's known in the females.
Sakaluk hypothesized that male crickets were taking advantage of the sensory bias of females to give their sperm more time to fertilize their eggs. The longer a female spends eating a gift, the longer it take for her to remove the sperm package from her body. Sakaluk came up with a way to see test this idea. Comparisons of crickets show that originally they produced sperm packages but no gifts. The gifts evolved later, and only in certain cricket lineages. Sakaluk reasoned that female crickets from gift-less species should have a pre-existing weakness for gifts. So he fed the decorated cricket gifts to females of three other cricket species as they were courting. They eagerly feasted on the gift, and the males who mated with them were able to get twice as much sperm into them than without a gift. (His work will appear in the January 2006 issue of American Naturalist.)
The gifts are apparently more than just a tasty distraction, however. The males apparently spike them with an antiaphrodisiac. Sakaluk found that when female crickets of other species at the gifts, they were much slower to mate again. Without a gift, 82% of female house crickets in his experiment mated again within a day. But only 43% of females who ate a decorated cricket gift did.
Gifts allow males to manipulate females to their advantage. But their manipulation puts a female at a distinct disadvantage. Sakaluk has found that the more males a female decorated cricket can mate with, the more offspring she produces that survive to maturity. That would suggest that mutations that allow females to resist the effects of gifts may be favored by natural selection. And Sakaluk has found evidence that this resistance has indeed evolved. Unlike other species, a female decorated cricket can eat a gift and not experience any delay in finding her next mate. Sakaluk proposes that when male decorated crickets first began delivering antiaphrodisiacs, the females were as vulnerable as other species are today. But since then they've built up so much resistance that the chemicals have no effect on them.
Can we see a reflection of our own lives in the decorated crickets? Not when it comes to gift giving, no matter how cynical you may be about why men give women roses or chocolates. But men and women do have some conflicts of interest when it comes to children. The faster a baby grows in her mother's body, for example, the healthier it will be in later life. But if it grows too quickly, the mother may suffer and ultimately have fewer babies. Some evidence suggests that our genes have been shaped by this conflict. Male versions of certain genes spur babies to grow faster, while the female versions slow them down.
Even leaving our own evolution aside, Sakaluk's research is fascinating. It's part of a burgeoning field of research that you can read about in the new book, Sexual Conflict. The crickets in your backyard are locked in an arms race that began long before we came on the scene, and will continue long after we're gone.
Back in March I described a provocative paper that suggested that plants might be able to get around Mendel's laws of heredity. Reed Cartwright, the grad student behind De Rerum Natura, left a comment expressing some deep skepticism. Now he reports that he and Luca Comai of the University of Washington have published a letter in the journal Plant Cell. You can read the letter for free. (There's another paper commenting on it in the journal, but it requires a subscription.)
In the original experiment, scientists bred plants, noting which version of a gene called hothead got passed down to new generations and which did not. Sometimes plants were born with a version of hothead that appeared to have been lost in previous generations. The scientists suggested that somehow the plants were storing a back-up copy of the hothead allele somewhere.
Comai and Cartwright argue that something more conventional was actually happening. Thanks to how the scientists carried out the experiment, they inadvertently caused their plants to mutate much more often than normal plants would. In all those mutations, some happened to alter the hothead gene, changing it back to its ancestral form. Comai and Cartwright propose that pollen grains containing the newly mutated hothead gene could do a better job of fertilizing eggs than the other version. The combined effect of a higher mutation rate and selection produced the strange results that seemed to violate Mendel's laws.
This is turning into a fascinating debate--and one that seems to have some parallels with another debate that Cartwright doesn't appear to have mentioned.
In the 1980s, some scientists claimed to have found evidence of what they called "adaptive mutation." Conventionally, mutations were seen as occurring pretty much randomly, with no influence from the environmental challenges organisms face. It just so happens that some of those mutations help some individuals reproduce more than others. But scientists did experiments that suggested that bacteria could rapidly acquire the mutations they "needed" when faced with a challenge. The classic example of adaptive mutation involved E. coli that was given lactose to eat. But before the bacteria got a chance to enjoy this meal, the scientists inserted mutations in the gene that produced an enzyme that's essential for digesting lactose. Remarkably, the bacteria did not starve. Instead, they rapidly acquired mutations to the lactose-digesting gene that let it function again.
Almost 20 years later, some scientists still argue that this represents a weird and wonderful exception to the conventional picture of evolution. But others have expressed serioius skepticism. It's likely, they argue, that a pretty ordinary series of events produces a seemingly strange result.
Introducing a mutation into the lactose-digesting enzyme cripples it, they argue, but doesn't completely destroy it. On its own, this crippled enzyme can't provide enough food for E. coli to stay alive. But every now and then genes get accidentally duplicated. Extra crippled genes boost a microbe's ability to digest lactose, allowing E. coli to get just enough energy to reproduce. Microbes with extra copies of the gene are strongly favored by natural selection, so that more and more copies spread through the population. And with all these extra copies of the crippled gene floating around the population, the odds are raised that a random mutation will restore it to its normal function. You can read the latest version of this attack on adaptive mutation here.
This kind of evolution may actually matter a lot to E. coli and other microbes in the wild, giving them the ability to adapt to new challenges. The mechanism that Comai and Cartwright propose for plants, on the other hand, may only have bearing on the particular experiment in question. But it's still intriguing in both cases to see how conventional evolutionary biology may be able produce some results that look anything but conventional.
Corante: technology, business, media, law, and culture news from the blogosphere
OUR PUBLICATIONS:
Corante is a trusted, unbiased source on technology, business, law, science, and culture that’s authored by leading commentators and thinkers in their respective fields. Corante also produces premium conferences and publications that help decision-makers better understand their industries and the world around them.
Corante Blogs
Corante Blogs examine, through the eyes of leading observers, analysts, thinkers, and doers, critical themes and memes in technology, business, law, science, and culture.
Vin Crosbie, on the challenges, financial and otherwise, that newspaper publishers are facing: "The real problem, Mr. Newspaperman, isn't that your content isn't online or isn't online with multimedia. It's your content. Specifically, it's what you report, which stories you publish, and how you publish them to people, who, by the way, have very different individual interests. The problem is the content you're giving them, stupid; not the platform its on."
by Vin Crosbie in Rebuilding Media
There's a problem in the drug industry that people have recognized for some years, but we're not that much closer to dealing with it than we were then. We keep coming up with these technologies and techniques which seem as if they might be able to help us with some of our nastiest problems - I'm talking about genomics in all its guises, and metabolic profiling, and naturally the various high-throughput screening platforms, and others. But whether these are helping or not (and opinions sure do vary), one thing that they all have in common is that they generate enormous heaps of data.
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline
Now that the Web labor market is saturated and Web design a static profession, it's not surprising that 'user experience' designers and researchers who've spent their careers online are looking for new worlds to conquer. Some are returning to the “old media” as directors and producers. More are now doing offline consulting (service experience design, social policy design, exhibition design, and so on) under the 'user experience' aegis. They argue that the lessons they've learned on the Web can be applied to phenomena in the physical and social worlds. But there are enormous differences...
by Bob Jacobson in Total Experience
Clay Shirky, in deconstructing Second Life hype: "Second Life is heading towards two million users. Except it isn’t, really... I suspect Second Life is largely a 'Try Me' virus, where reports of a strange and wonderful new thing draw the masses to log in and try it, but whose ability to retain anything but a fraction of those users is limited. The pattern of a Try Me virus is a rapid spread of first time users, most of whom drop out quickly, with most of the dropouts becoming immune to later use."
by Clay Shirky in Many-to-Many
Over the last few years we've seen old barriers to creativity coming down, one after the other. New technologies and services makes it trivial to publish text, whether by blog or by print-on-demand. Digital photography has democratised a previously expensive hobby. And we're seeing the barriers to movie-making crumble, with affordable high-quality cameras and video hosting provided by YouTube or Google Video and their ilk... Music making has long been easy for anyone to engage in, but technology has made high-quality recording possible without specialised equipment, and the internet has revolutionised distribution, drastically disintermediating the music industry... What's left? Software maybe? Or maybe not."
by Suw Charman in Strange Attractor
Derek Lowe on the news that the Nobel Prize for medicine has gone to Craig Mello and Andrew Fire for their breakthrough work: "RNA interference is probably going to have a long climb before it starts curing many diseases, because many of those problems are even tougher than usual in its case. That doesn't take away from the discovery, though, any more than the complications of off-target effects take away from it when you talk about RNAi's research uses in cell culture. The fact that RNA interference is trickier than it first looked, in vivo or in vitro, is only to be expected. What breakthrough isn't?"
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline
Andrew Phelps: "Recently my WoW guild has been having a bit of a debate on the merits of Player-vs.-Player (PvP) within Azeroth. My personal opinion on this is that PvP has its merits, and can be incredible fun, but the system within WoW is horridly, horribly broken. It takes into account the concept of the battle, but battle without consequence, without emotive context, and most importantly, without honor..."
From later in the piece: "When I talk about this with people (thus far anyway) I typically get one of two responses, either 'yeah, right on!' or 'hey, it’s war, and war isn’t honorable – grow the hell up'. There is a lot to be said for that argument – but the problem is that war in the real historical world has very different constraints that are utterly absent from fantasized worlds..."
by Andrew Phelps in Got Game
Derek Lowe: "So, you're developing a drug candidate. You've settled on what looks like a good compound - it has the activity you want in your mouse model of the disease, it's not too hard to make, and it's not toxic. Everything looks fine. Except. . .one slight problem. Although the compound has good blood levels in the mouse and in the dog, in rats it's terrible. For some reason, it just doesn't get up there. Probably some foul metabolic pathway peculiar to rats (whose innards are adapted, after all, for dealing with every kind of garbage that comes along). So, is this a problem?.."
by Derek Lowe in In the Pipeline
Bob Jacobson, on shopping at his local Albertsons supermarket where he had "one of the worst customer experiences" of his life: "Say what you will about the Safeway chain or the Birkenstock billionaires who charge through the roof for Whole Foods' organic fare, they know how to create shopping environments that create a more pleasurable experience, at its best (as at Whole Foods) quite enjoyable. Even the warehouses like Costco and its smaller counterpart, Smart & Final, do just fine: they have no pretentions, but neither do they dump virtual garbage on the consumer merely to create another trivial revenue stream, all for the sake of promotions in the marketing department..."
by Strange Attractor in Total Experience
Kevin Anderson: "First off, I want to say that I really admire the ambition of the Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free. It is one of the boldest statements made by any media company that participation needs to be central to a radical revamp of traditional content strategies... It is, therfore, not hugely surprising to find that Comment is Free is having a few teething troubles..."
by Kevin Anderson in strange
Corante Developments
Here you will find the latest news from Corante including updates on upcoming events, new initiatives, product and publication launches, and more.
It was with shock that I returned home from a night out last night to hear the news of Russell's passing. How terribly, terribly sad. Most of all for him, as he'd seemed buoyant, healthier, and content when I'd last seen him several months ago when he was in town - he was happy that work was busy and rewarding and was having fun with it but most of all was thrilled about how things were going with his girlfriend, Ellen.
I've known Russ for what seems like ages now (in a good way) though in fact it's only been about six or seven years since the early days of "commercial" blogging when he started working on various projects at and around Corante. He was a diligent, committed, and prolific journalist who had impressively and more ably than others been able to make the transition from the old-school way of doing things to the new. He had his quirks, as we all do, but I greatly valued that he was good-natured, collegial, reliable, quick to adopt, trustworthy, eager to learn, and earnest in his interest in helping others better understand what he wrote about.
He was also, it should be said, a kind and thoughtful soul and it was the rare conversation in which he didn't ask, with sincerity, about what he knew of my life, e.g. our new babe, and we didn't talk as seemingly old friends about our lives and respective paths. I can't say I knew him very well, of course, but in our half-dozen get-togethers over the years and dozens of conversations I got a good sense of the man: he cared about learning and sharing and his bearing was earnest and ego-less and we'll miss him for that and more.
We wanted to let you know about a discount to New Comm Forum, the annual event event put on by our friends at the Society for New Communications Research. The conference, which runs from April 22-25, will feature many of the field's leading observers and is an important event for those looking, in the words of SNCR, to "better understand new communications tools, technologies and emerging modes of communication, and their effect on traditional media, professional communications, business, culture and society."
Check out the event's website and, if you're interested in attending, be sure to use the code supplied below for a special discount.
EARLY BIRD PRICING - NOW UNTIL FEB. 15th
NewComm Forum Conference - $995.
Pre-conference or post-conference session - $195.
SNCR Jam only - $75.
REGULAR PRICING - AFTER FEB. 15th
NewComm Forum Conference - $1095.
Pre-conference or post-conference session - $249.
SNCR Jam only - $75.
CORANTE READER DISCOUNTS
NewComm Forum Conference - save an additional $100
Use discount code: NCF08100
Pre-conference or post-conference session - save an additional $45.
Use discount code: NCF0845
We've been remiss in letting you know about two new independent blogs we've helped launch in the past month or so.
The first - the ConversationHub - is a companion blog to Supernova 2007, the latest edition of Kevin Werbach's excellent conference on all things connected. As the conference site says: "Supernova examines the effects of an increasingly connected world on business, life, and public policy. As disparate physical and social networks link with one another, a new societal network is rapidly evolving... The New Network is greater than the sum of its parts. It challenges us to re-create everything from the software and hardware we use...to the business models we employ...to the information and entertainment we encounter...to the ways we work and play."
Visit the ConversationHub and you'll find several dozen leading thinkers and doers, led by a few notable ringleaders, weighing in on the themes and trends of the day in technology and business. We encourage you to tune in - feel free to comment and even suggest topics and ideas for posts.
The second blog - Mobile Messaging 2.0 - convenes about a dozen top observers of the mobile messaging space for an intense discussion of the industry and where it's headed. Among its contributors are leading commentators, journalists and players in the field - tune in and you'll find them touching on topics such as mobile device design, messaging platforms, market pressures, user-generated content, interface design, and much, much more.
Also, if you visit the site, which is sponsored by Airwide Solutions, this week, you'll find live coverage and commentary from Global Messaging 2007, to which several of our contributors have traveled to hear about the latest developments from a broad spectrum of the industry's players and providers.
Be sure to catch the Office 2.0 Conference and hear from and engage with leading thinkers and doers in this exciting new market. Find out more here and be sure to use the code "GLDRK" for a special discount for Corante readers.
Writing about paleontology without illustrations is like directing a movie without a camera. When I wrote my first book, 
Back in February I discovered the remarkable work of Australian biologist 
Following up on my earlier 
As a father of two dawn-loving children I don't get as much sleep as I used to, which makes me wonder sometimes why I crave it so much. A number of scientists who share my curiosity have turned to sleeping animals to find an answer. Sleep appears to be an ancient behavior, perhaps 600 million years old or older. But it may not exist "for" any one purpose. Instead, sleep can serve many functions, as animals are shaped by evolutionary tradeoffs. I've written an 
The insects scandalously embracing in this picture are decorated crickets (Grylllodes sigillatus), which can be found in the southwestern United States, among other places. The droplet on the male's tail is--for want of a better word--a gift. After producing this glob he sticks it onto the package of sperm he places on the female. After the crickets are finished with their encounter, the female will grab the gift and snack on it.
Back in March I 