A review of Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts by Emily Anthes
256 pages
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

An unusual cat lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. Named Mr. Green Genes, he looks like your average orange tabby. But under dark light, he has a neat parlor trick: his eyes, nose, and ears glow green, Rudolph-the-reindeer style. This is because scientists tinkered with his DNA to include a jellyfish gene for fluorescence. Although a silly outcome, it was a serious study monitoring how the glow gene would express itself in foreign species.

In recent decades, other house cats have been subject to seemingly strange science experiments. They have been cloned, surgically altered to include microphone implants, and given pirate-peg-leg-looking prosthetics limbs. These feline Frankensteins offer a taste of the wild things people are doing to animals these days in the name of science, wildlife conservation, medicine, national security, consumerism, and animal love. In her riveting first book, Frankenstein’s Cat, Emily Anthes explores these colorful cats and a menagerie of other animals—from dogs to goldfish, dolphins to seabirds, goats to grizzly bears—at the forefront of this animal biotechnology explosion. Full Review »

A pair of cheetah cubs, a brother and sister named Justin and Carmelita, has charmed Smithsonian National Zoo visitors in Washington D.C. since their public debut in July 2012. The eleven-month old cats have shed their baby fuzz for sleek orange fur patterned with black spots. Yet despite their adult stature, the cats still act like rambunctious youngsters, chasing each other around their pen and playfully wrestling.

This is all good for now – but in a year’s time these young cats will be taken off exhibit, just like their parents before them, and started down parallel paths to confront their destiny as genetically robust cheetahs, sired to save their species from extinction.

The world has undergone a massive cheetah drain over the last century largely due to loss of natural habitats and conflicts with humans. Wild cheetah populations have plunged 90 percent, from around 100,000 cheetahs in the early 1900s to roughly 10,000 today. The situation is further complicated by low genetic variability among the species. Saving the cheetahs from extinctions means not only increasing numbers, but also ensuring the new population is genetically healthy. Full Article »

New Jersey and New York lost thousands of trees to Hurricane Sandy. “They were uprooted, they were snapped,” says Lawrence Hajna, a press officer at the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. State parks “focused on removing any hazardous trees that would impact public areas” including trails and visitor centers, he adds. Trees not in the way were largely ignored.

However, the fate of broken non-hazardous trees on private land is more variable. If past storms are any indication, these trees are likely destined for the axe for cleaning purposes. But “the forest does not need us to clean,” says Audrey Barker-Plotkin, an ecologist at Harvard and author on the study. And will “probably recover more quickly and less dramatically if we leave it alone.” Full Article »

Responding to online pleas for help, around 400 Hurricane Sandy relief volunteers arrived at the doors of 1128 Olympia Boulevard in Midland, Staten Island, early Saturday morning, December 1, 2012.

Wanting to do more than follow the relief efforts remotely and or to give donations that would be used in unknown ways, this motley crew of volunteers, some of whom had bused in from neighboring states, wanted to make on-the-ground tangible impacts.

So they turned to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, online tools that promote community information sharing, to connect with folks managing community relief efforts—or sometimes directly with the people in need—to find opportunities to help. Full Article »

The human body is really picky when it comes to receiving new blood. There are four dominant blood types in humans—A, B, AB, and O—and if you mismatch types during a blood transfusion the consequences can be fatal.

Besides blood transfusions, the role of blood type is unclear. Our genetic cousins, monkeys, may offer some clues as to the significance and evolution of blood types, reports a new study.

In humans, the most common blood transfusions involve the most numerous cells in the blood: red blood cells. These cells transport oxygen to body tissue. Coating the surface of red blood cells are substances that serve as the body’s guard dogs. The type of substance your body has defines your blood type. For example, someone with red blood cells covered in substance A is said to have type A blood.

During a transfusion, these substances are on alert. They can detect whether new red blood cells are covered in similar material (meaning the new blood is compatible with the body) or a different one (meaning the new blood is not compatible). If an incompatible substance is spotted, the security alarm is triggered and the body launches an attack. Similar substances are found across monkey species, from chimpanzees to vervet monkeys to gibbons. Full Article »

Around the Caribbean, the storm reaches a transition point. Usually it loses momentum, dissipating into oblivion. But in rare instances, the storm abruptly—and mysteriously—intensifies into to a hurricane. So why does that chance storm become so much stronger? This very basic question haunted MIT meteorologist Jule Charney for some seven years.

Charney’s very entrance into the field was meandering, from math (bachelors) to theoretical physics (masters) to eventually climate and weather (doctorate), all at the University of California, Los Angeles. There Charney was mentored by Jacob Bjerknes, the first researcher to identify the connection between the ocean and atmosphere, as well as to recognize the significance of this interaction on long-term climatic variation. For Charney, as he later put it, Bjerknes’ enduring lesson was that, “though the atmosphere is disconcertingly complex, it is not hopelessly so.” Full Article »

Animal prints are in the spotlight this fall, from the runway to the microscope. But while designers are merely recreating trendy animal-inspired patterns, scientists are studying the actual source of these patterns. Their subject of choice: the ordinary house cat.

Why cats? The cat family offers “a nice example of diversity” in coat designs, says Stanford University geneticist Greg Barsh. This is especially true for domestic cats of the tabby variety, which may be spotted, striped, or plain. Conveniently for researchers, house cats are also smaller, friendlier, and more accessible than their wild counterparts.

From previous experiments, scientists already knew that a single yet undetermined gene controlled whether a tabby had stripes or spots. To reveal this gene’s identity, Barsh and colleagues collected and compared DNA samples from fifty-one striped and fifty-eight spotted cats, as reported in a September edition of Science. In this way they discovered a gene called Taqpep that turned on or off depending on the tabby type. In striped cats, the gene functioned correctly. But in spotted cats, the gene curiously remained inactive.

The same gene was later examined in cheetahs. When operating normally, the gene adorned the cheetah in elegant black spots. But in rare king cheetahs, the gene was faulty, resulting in streaky black blotches. From pet tabbies to wild cheetahs, the activation of Taqpep—or lack there of—resulted in definitive coat-pattern differences. Full Article »

The Earth mysteriously slipped into a mini ice age around 12,900 years ago. And concurrently in North America many small animals and approximately thirty-six large mammals, including mammoths and saber tooth tigers, went extinct.

Scientists do not agree on what caused the cooling or extinctions, but new evidence supports the theory that a cluster of comets exploding in our planet’s atmosphere was responsible. Microscopic spheres made of scorched earth material have been discovered in 12,900-year old soil and are thought to be the debris from the impact, according to a recent study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This impact theory suggests that in the span of an hour, dozens to thousands of large comet fragments, each of which measured at least a half-mile across, blasted through Earth’s atmosphere and rained down on North America, South America, and Europe. Heated and destabilized by friction with the atmosphere, fragments exploded in the air producing flashes brighter than the sun and temperatures of approximately 2,000 degrees Celsius. Full Article »

Frequent use of popular painkillers may increase a person’s risk of hearing loss, caution researchers.

Already known to cause one form of ear damage called tinnitus, a ringing in the ears, painkillers have long been suspected to cause hearing loss as well. To find out, scientists singled out the three most prevalent types of painkillers—ibuprofen, acetaminophen (found in Tylenol), and aspirin—and tracked both drug usage and hearing in 62,261 registered female nurses in the United States between 1995 and 2009.

An article published on September 15 in the Journal of American Epidemiology presented the women-specific findings and compared the results to a previous parallel investigation involving men. The researchers concluded that associations between painkiller use and risk of hearing loss does exist, although the magnitudes of the associations vary depending on a participant’s age and sex. Full Article »