How Microbes Defend and Define Us
Dr. Khoruts mixed a small sample of her husband’s stool with saline solution and delivered it into her colon. Writing in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology last month, Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues reported that her diarrhea vanished in a day. Her Clostridium difficile infection disappeared as well and has not returned since.
The procedure — known as bacteriotherapy or fecal transplantation — had been carried out a few times over the past few decades. But Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues were able to do something previous doctors could not: they took a genetic survey of the bacteria in her intestines before and after the transplant.
Which may sound gross to some people, but a fascinating article at the NYT. If the subject sounds like an obtuse science story and maybe something that belongs in the odd news of the day section, think of microbes and mammals as live sustaining partners. Mysterious partners at that. As George Weinstock of Washington University in St. Louis notes in the story, the human body has 10 times more microbes than human cells. Every year we have an outbreak of E. coli poisoning, yet we all have a harmless type of E. coli living in our guts right now. The foreign E.coli is bad for us, even life threatening, but our own E. coli helps with digestion.
Everglades and Madagascar forests on Unesco danger list
A UN panel has added Florida’s Everglades National Park and Madagascar’s tropical rainforest to a list of world heritage sites at risk.
Unesco’s World Heritage Committee said development in the Everglades had caused water flow to fall 60% in the wetland, a major wildlife sanctuary.
The pollution level there was so high it was killing marine life, it added.
Illegal logging and poaching following last year’s military coup has meanwhile imperilled Madagascar’s rainforests.
The good news is the Galapagos Islands – made famous by Charles Darwin’s journey on the Beagle – has been removed from the list as Ecuador has made some progress towards their ecological recovery.
U.S. nuclear front-runners begin to slow spending
The U.S. House of Representatives has approved the Obama administration’s request to add $36 billion to the loan guarantee fund as part of the president’s goal to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil, create jobs and pare greenhouse gas emissions. The Senate has not acted on the request for new money yet.
Still, the DOE still has $10 billion in existing funds it can allocate. Three project hopefuls remain on the DOE loan short-list — Constellation Energy Group’s Calvert Cliffs expansion in Maryland, NRG Energy’s South Texas Project two-unit addition and SCANA Corp’s Summer project in South Carolina.
One still frequently hears the objection to alternative/renewable energy as not economically feasible because it relies on subsidies. So does nuclear energy. We also subsidize the oil and natural gas industries. We also subsidize the coal industry. When coal companies Massey Energy blows the tops off mountains that has associated costs. Many of which are picked up by tax payers.
tangledwing 