If necessity begets invention, then Nicaraguan nurses should be some of the most creative people around.

The name of the game in rural Latin American health clinics is resource limitation. Basic medical equipment is hard to come by, and electricity is an exception rather than a rule. When items break or run out, doctors and nurses might go for days or weeks without essential supplies. Their only reliable resource is their ability to improvise with what little material they have.

Unfortunately, that very skill goes unnoticed and untapped by most outsiders who try to help. Ninety percent of the medical technology in poor countries is secondhand equipment from the developed world. And eighty percent of that equipment bites the dust within six months at a rough-edged rural facility. When a high-tech medical device stops working, villagers don’t have the training, tools, or materials to fix it, nor do they have the money to replace it. Full Article »

The patient came to Boston City Hospital in fall 1929 after two weeks of difficulty urinating, when he noticed “a watery foul-smelling pus coming from an opening just above the pubis.” The patient was a 52-year-old African-American man, likely poor in money and education, who arrived in the urologist’s office pale and weak, reeking of urine and rotting flesh. The doctor, the same age as his patient, was a urologist and Harvard professor, graduate of Oberlin College ’03 and Harvard Medical School ’07. Dr. Augustus Riley lived at a posh address in Boston, 857 Beacon Street, and went golfing on weekends with other physicians. Dr. Riley would publish an account of this surgery in The New England Journal of Medicine.

A surgical photo shows the scrotum of this African-American male. Dr. Riley’s paper doesn’t mention the race of his patient, but you can tell from the dark pigmentation of his hand, holding up the hospital gown to expose his “gangrenous peritoneum.” In the black-and-white photograph, now in the archives at Harvard’s Countway Medical Library, the patient’s abdomen is punctured with holes, his penis attached to the catheter that saved his life. The nasty-looking gashes to the right of the patient’s belly-button are the surgical treatment for urinary extravasacation: incisions of the abdominal wall to drain urine that has leaked out of the vasa, or tubes, poisoning the abdomen. The resulting gangrene, without the aid of modern antibiotics, almost certainly killed him, according to present-day surgeon Dr. Norman McGowin. But such cases nevertheless required documentation and attempts at treatment.

Dr. Riley published this article at the height of his career as a surgeon and professor in Boston. But his life at Harvard was only possible because the doctor hid a secret. On the day this photo was taken in 1929, the patient was not the only black man in the room.

Gus Riley’s mother, Sallie McCreary, was born a slave.

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Fruit fly researchers have found the master control switch—a gene called spalt—that turns walking muscles into flight muscles.

Flies deprived of spalt grew up unable to fly. Their flight muscles were tubular and slow-moving, like leg muscles, instead of fibrillar and fast-moving as they should have been. And when the scientists switched on spalt where it didn’t belong, leg muscles developed a fibrillar structure like the one normally found in flight muscles.

This discovery could shed light on muscle development all the way up to humans. The cardiac muscle of mammals is very similar to insect flight muscle, not only in its fibrillar structure, but also in the way that it contracts. Furthermore, mammalian hearts are known to express two spalt-like genes. A mutation in one of these genes causes the heart abnormalities seen in Townes-Brocks syndrome. Full Article »

Invasive rats and birds in New Zealand have partially taken over the important role of the pollinators they ousted, complicating eradication of these invaders according to a recent study.

While it was already known that invasive species occasionally help the ecosystems they invade, this study quantified that effect. The results highlight one of the complexities of dealing with invasive species: sometimes removing them can harm the already-damaged ecosystem.

In the study, researchers took advantage of the unique ecology of New Zealand. On the North Island, invasive species have pushed out the endemic pollinators; but on small islands off the coast, scientists have managed to eradicate these invaders, and native fauna are flourishing, effectively giving researchers a window into the ecology of 18th century New Zealand.

By setting up mesh “cages” on three species of flowering trees, they allowed insects access to them while keeping vertebrates out. By comparing the pollination rates of caged flowers versus those left open, they could quantify the impact of vertebrate pollinators—and compare those rates between locations. Then they used video cameras to see who was visiting. Full Article »

Spiders can fend off ants by coating their web with the predators’ own alarm chemical, reports a new study of Singapore spiders and ants.

Only spiders whose webs are thick enough for ants to crawl on seem to use the chemical, suggesting that different spider species may have evolved targeted chemical weaponry.

The insect world is full of mysteries, and spiders and ants were the center of this one. Spider webs are made of silk, a biomaterial whose strength and elasticity make an efficient trap for catching prey. But staying on or near the web makes the spider a sitting duck for potential predators, including wasps as well as ants. Yet ants steer clear of webs.

Spiders are known for the defenses they have evolved for escaping wasps, their main flying predator: “leaf-refuges” for hiding; camouflage silk decorations to make the spider look threatening; “drag-lines” to drop from the web, and the ability to color-shift, as octopi sometimes do in corral reefs. But little was known about spider defenses against ants—or how a particular spider species’ weapons might adapt to its specific predators.

Orb-weaver spiders, a common spider family worldwide, are an attractive meal to ants, since they are large, meaty, sedentary, and easily immobilized by an ant army. Yet ants are rarely found on webs. Why not? Full Article »

You’re far more likely to get the flu from breathing in the virus when you’re around someone who has it than you are from touching infected items around your house, say researchers from Great Britain.

Most household materials can’t sustain enough influenza—the virus which causes the common disease we call “the flu”—to infect another person by physical contact after only a few hours. These results confirmed what most scientists suspected: the influenza virus is quite fragile.

To test the survival of the virus on household items, researchers deposited small amounts of influenza on items like light switches, toys, kitchen counters, keyboards, and window glass in a laboratory setting. Then they measured the amount of viable virus (meaning a large enough quantity to lead to an infection) at set times.

On all surfaces tested, there was no longer any viable virus after nine hours. In fact, most surfaces could be considered “contamination free” in four hours or less. Hard, non-porous materials such as stainless steel allowed for longer survival times while softer, porous materials like wood allowed for the shortest.

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Researchers have been able to disable bacteria that cause ulcers by removing the bacteria’s ability to get close to the stomach wall.

This new knowledge about how the immune system responds to H. pylori infections could be used to screen for patients more susceptible to stomach ulcers and cancer, and perhaps to create more targeted therapies for those already affected.

In order to both survive and cause inflammation in the stomach, bacteria need to get to the side of the stomach “and set up shop there, living adjacent to your stomach cells, in a little kind of cozy home,” says Karen Ottemann, whose study was published this week in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Unlike the acidic middle of the stomach, “the pH is closer to neutral and there’s food coming out of the cells,” she notes.

Ottemann found that the bacteria’s ability to move away from an acidic environment and towards one with food, called chemotaxis, was crucial to causing inflammation in the stomach. “To live really cozy like that,” she explains, “they need to be able to swim, and they need to be able to know where they’re going to direct their swimming.” Full Article »

Picks and chisels may soon have a powerful new companion in paleontologists’ toolkits: artificial intelligence can help find fossils.

Scientists have shown that a computer program called a neural network can be trained to look at images of landscapes and pick out areas likely to be fossil beds. This is the first time paleontologists have used neural networks to locate fossils. The procedure may prove to be an effective addition to established methods, say scientists.

The researchers behind the pioneering effort—Glenn Conroy of Washington University in St. Louis, and Robert Anemone and Charles Emerson of Western Michigan University—explain that modern paleontologists do their work in much the same way as their predecessors of the last century and a half. “A hundred and fifty years ago, when the science was just beginning,” says Anemone, “people ended up walking long distances out in the badlands of the West. Today we have geological and topographical maps, but we still just go out to these areas and walk around looking for [fossils].”

“For every spectacular fossil that you read about in newspapers or in National Geographic,” adds Conroy, “there have probably been hundreds or thousands of man-hours previous to that discovery of just slogging around, finding nothing.” Full Article »

In HIV infection populations of immune system cells are devastated, but researchers have found one immune cell type that survives the onslaught.

These surviving cells prevent inflammation, but they do so by suppressing the immune system. This new finding raises the question of whether their survival during HIV infection helps the body or the attacking virus.

The cells, called T regulators, may be useful because they normally prevent a hyperactive immune system which leads to its exhaustion.

But in the case of HIV infection their role of suppression could be disastrous, if this effect means the immune system causes its own demise by shutting itself down in a time of crisis. Knowing the difference could eventually help develop new HIV treatments, and this will be a central question guiding future research.

The reason why the Jekyll and Hyde nature of T regulators (T-regs) are being found now, after thirty years of HIV research, is because researchers are looking in a new place, one that has been harder to investigate. Full Article »