We Need More Science

Cigarette Smoke Makes Superbugs More Aggressive

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), an antibiotic-resistant superbug, can cause life-threatening skin, bloodstream and surgical site infections or pneumonia. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine now report that cigarette smoke may make matters worse. The study, published March 30 by Infection and Immunity, shows that MRSA bacteria exposed to cigarette smoke become even more resistant to killing by the immune system.

"We already know that smoking cigarettes harms human respiratory and immune cells, and now we've shown that, on the flipside, smoke can also stress out invasive bacteria and make them more aggressive," said senior author Laura E. Crotty Alexander, MD, assistant clinical professor of medicine at UC San Diego and staff physician at the Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System.

Crotty Alexander is a pulmonologist who sees many patients who smoke cigarettes. She also sees many MRSA infections, and that got her wondering if one might influence the other. To test the hypothesis, Crotty Alexander and her team infected macrophages, immune cells that engulf pathogens, with MRSA. Some of the bacteria were grown normally and some were grown with cigarette smoke extract. They found that while the macrophages were equally able to take up the two bacterial populations, they had a harder time killing the MRSA that had been exposed to cigarette smoke extract.

To better understand why, the Crotty Alexander team tested the bacteria's susceptibility to individual mechanisms macrophages typically employ to kill bacteria. Once inside macrophages, smoke-exposed MRSA were more resistant to killing by reactive oxygen species, the chemical burst that macrophages use to destroy their microbial meals. The team also discovered that smoke-exposed MRSA were more resistant to killing by antimicrobial peptides, small protein pieces the immune system uses to poke holes in bacterial cells and trigger inflammation. The effect was dose-dependent, meaning that the more smoke extract they used, the more resistant the MRSA became.

MRSA treated with cigarette smoke extract were also better at sticking to and invading human cells grown in the lab. In a mouse model, MRSA exposed to cigarette smoke survived better and caused pneumonia with a higher mortality rate.

The data suggest that cigarette smoke strengthens MRSA bacteria by altering their cell walls in such a way that they are better able to repel antimicrobial peptides and other charged particles.

"Cigarette smokers are known to be more susceptible to infectious diseases. Now we have evidence that cigarette smoke-induced resistance in MRSA may be an additional contributing factor," Crotty Alexander said.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by University of California, San Diego Health Sciences . The original article was written by Heather Buschman, PhD. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Why Bill Nye Makes the Perfect Leslie Knope

Bill Nye would like to change the world. Well, he’d like you to change the world with him. Recently named a centennial ambassador of the National Park Service, he’s now using his platform as everyone’s favorite Science Guy to educate people about climate change and get them interested in preserving their local parks.

So yeah, he’s basically Leslie Knope in a bowtie.

“We did 100 Science Guy shows and it was time to move on and up,” says Nye. “It’s been an evolution, a growth: the modern adult science guy as a spokesman for … science! For provable facts and observable things in nature.”

To help average folks know where go to get out in nature and observe those things, he’s championing the just-launched Find Your Parks initiative, which is aimed at expanding interest in our American treasures beyond the Baby Boomer generation and bringing a younger, more diverse group of citizens into the country’s parks. And for Nye specifically, the initiative is a way to educate people about the impact climate change will have on the natural landscape.

It’s a pretty cool gig for someone like Nye, and one he’s uniquely suited for. Here’s why he is the perfect real-life version of Parks and Recreation’s public space champion—and not just because his ambassadorship has the support of Find Your Parks honorary co-chair Michelle Obama. (Though that doesn’t hurt, either.)

He’s Not Afraid of Real Talk

With each month of drought that stacks up in the West and each massive storm that trashes the East, it’s becoming clear that our parks—much like our crops—won’t survive without our help. A big part of that is opening people’s eyes to the effects of climate change. “Glacier National Park will be Mudslide National Park, perhaps in my lifetime, unless we get to work on it,” Nye explains. “If we make choices not to preserve parks, not to set aside wild lands, we are making a choice that I think will be judged very poorly. ‘Why did you choose to let all that stuff go? Why did you choose to ruin things?'”

He’s Very Popular—On TV and Beyond

Most people know the name Bill Nye from the 1990s PBS show Bill Nye the Science Guy. The “Science Guy” thing is a moniker he took on as a contributor to the comedy show Almost Live! in Seattle, where he was working for Boeing. Eventually his “mechanical engineer by day, educational sketch comedian by night” situation lead him to becoming one of America’s go-to minds for explaining just what the hell makes this planet tick to the broadest common denominator of viewers. But over the past 25 years he’s been more than a TV host. He’s also been an author, an advocate for science education (particularly when it comes to evolution), and a regular on cable news and late night talk shows. He also pops up on the StarTalk podcast with Neil deGrasse Tyson and in selfies with people like Barack Obama. And if that resume doesn’t make him the perfect celebrity spokesperson, nothing does.

He Thinks Talking About the Environment Is as Important as Other News of the Day

If there’s one thing Nye is big on it is choice and agency. The environmental problems we face won’t solve themselves, and the best way to catalyze change, as Nye sees it, is to get people talking. Putting the focus on national parks is a way to incite discourse about our changing world and the effect we have on it as heavy-footed humans. “The big thing is just raising awareness right now,” he says. “The main thing you can do, and this is true for everybody, is talk about climate change. If we were talking about climate change the way we’re talking about ISIS, we could get things done much more effectively or much more quickly.”

Nye’s Ambitions Go Beyond Earth

Like fellow public science advocate Neil deGrasse Tyson, Nye is one of the inheritors of the legacy of astronomer, author, and original Cosmos host Carl Sagan, who Nye actually had as a professor at Cornell University. These days Tyson is hosting the rebooted Cosmos and Nye is CEO of the Planetary Society, which Sagan founded. In addition to answering a few dozen e-mails every day and making “some big sweeping executive decisions about the logo,” Nye views his CEO role as a charge to continue the work started by Sagan decades ago. “Any [computer] climate model that stands today is a derivative of, or uses many of the same assumptions and the same science as, those Sagan proposed in 1978, 1977,” says Nye. “In my way, I am carrying his message into the future.”

He’s Very Optimistic About What We Can Accomplish Together

As he takes up the mantle of centennial ambassador, Nye is waging a full-court educational press. First, there’s the book he’s currently working on that he describes as “an optimistic view of the future as we address climate change,” adding the inspirational footnote: “When I say ‘we’ I mean everybody, humankind. We can solve these problems. We can get this done.” And then there’s the feature film in the works about the same topic, which Nye says “will change the course of human history and all that, or maybe not. Maybe it just won’t lose money.” But whether or not Nye makes the next Inconvenient Truth or he goes straight to VOD, we can all be sure he will never stop fighting the good fight. “It will be very difficult for me to change the world just on my own,” Nye says. “But what we want to do is inspire people all over the world to change the world.”

Week’s Best Videos: Azealia Banks Has Hair Made of Snakes

Sometimes you want a music video to come equipped with a hard-hitting socially conscious message, and sometimes you just want to watch people go crazy throwing color powder around. To each their own, and to each we dedicate this week’s roundup of top music videos. There’s a turtle navigating his way across a Micro Machine minefield, a nasty breakup between a pair of men in drag, and a surprise threesome. We won’t tell you where to find each of these Easter eggs, but immerse yourselves in these videos and all will be revealed.

“Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck)”—Run the Jewels feat. Zack de la Rocha (Above)

The team behind this Run the Jewels video really puts a fine point on the futility of police brutality, putting the subjects in a feedback loop of violence that feels very resonant in our current cultural climate.

“Everybody Is Somebody”—Chateau Marmont

This animation is so densely packed with pop culture and religious iconography it is literally dizzying. Artist and director Marion Dupas fills every frame with rich detail, so be ready to watch several times if you want to take in everything.

“Hard Came the Rain”—Ran’N’Bone Man

Whoa. This is a very intense short about a drag performer and his jealous ex-lover.

“Come Back to You”—Saint Raymond

When life happens in the back of a British cab.

“Rule the World”—Walk Off the Earth

So this video is kind of a hot mess, but in a totally endearing sort of way. It kept feeling like “Should we turn this off?” but we genuinely wanted to finish watching Walk Off the Earth wild out until the end.

“Let You Go”—The Chainsmokers ft. Great Good Fine Ok

Hey, we’ve all been there, right?

“Strong”—Herbert

There’s something super empowering about a song called “Strong” fueling one turtle’s journey across a landscape of tiny toy cars. This is your official Why Not?! video of the week.

“Ice Princess”—Azealia Banks

Medusa Azealia and her clone army of high-heeled silver droids is just super luscious. Mount your platinum python and ride into the rainbow prism volcano!

Samsung’s New 4K TVs Are Here, and They’re Gorgeous

The 65-inch Samsung JS9500, which costs $6,000, backs up its 4K resolution with an elegant design and quantum-dot color enhancement. Samsung

Grab the popcorn, folks. There are some mighty interesting developments going on in TV land.

After decades of Japanese dominance, the top of the TV market is a battle royale between South Korean and Chinese brands. The shift to 4K is in its early stages, and along with it, we’ll also see a transformation in smart platforms, content delivery, and how commercials work. OLED TVs are getting cheaper, and 1080p TVs are practically free.

Perhaps most importantly, the sets themselves are getting more and more stunning. Samsung, still the global market-share leader in the TV industry, launched its new SUHD TVs today. “SUHD” is the company’s code name for its quantum-dot-enhanced 4K TV lineup, its first collection of sets to run a new Tizen-based operating system for its smart ecosystem. It’s not just one TV, it’s a slew of tiered models—a sign that Samsung (and the rest of the industry) is betting heavily on 4K momentum this year. The top-end SUHD models are very very nice. The top-end models are also very very expensive.

One of the proposed advantages of quantum-dot technology is that it’s able to produce vivid, OLED-like colors at a fraction of the price of an OLED TV. That’s because quantum dot (or as Samsung is calling it, “revolutionary nano-crystal technology”) involves adding an extra component to an LCD TV rather than having to revamp the manufacturing process from scratch.

Alas, deep savings are not a trait of these first sets. The highest-end model in the SUHD lineup is the JS9500, an incredible-looking 65-incher that ships this month. It’s curved, it’s sharp, it’s vibrant, and it has a “Peak Illuminator Ultimate” feature which basically sounds like Samsung’s marketing spin on HDR. In other words, it boosts its full-array LED backlight system in the brightest areas of scenes, making it possible to see spectral highlights and life-like shimmering water.

The picture quality looks amazing, and the set has an elegant, sweeping design that makes it droolworthy even when it’s powered off. A modular One Connect box lets you upgrade its capabilities over time with new codecs, remote-control tricks, and other features without having to buy a new TV. And with a $6,000 starting price, you won’t want to buy a new TV for a while.

The “step-down” model is an even pricier proposition. The curved 78-inch JS9100 sports an edge-lit backlight system instead of the JS9500’s full-array LED setup, but it has many of the same features otherwise. The JS9100 is only available in that huge 78-inch screen size, and it’ll set you back $10,000 starting in May. Ouch.

They’re Not All Crazy Expensive

From there on down, you can find semi-savings. The edge-lit 65-inch JS9000 is basically the JS9500 without full-array, motion-control features, or a built-in camera—which many people would consider a plus—for $5,000. There’s also a 48-inch ($3,500) and 55-inch ($4,000) version of the JS9000, although those are small screen sizes for a 4K TV. The flat 65-inch J8500 ditches the curves, has a quad-core processor instead of the pricier sets’ eight-core CPUs, and has a 40W sound system instead of the 9000 series’ 60W speakers. That one clocks in at $4,000, or a cool $3,000 for a 55-inch version.

From there, you have lower-end SUHD sets that can save you money at smaller screen sizes. The most-affordable model is the curved JU6700, which costs $1,150 at 48 inches and $1,500 for a 55-incher. But even though it’s 4K, don’t expect the same kind of stunning picture as those 9000 series and 8000 series sets.

So the highest end of Samsung’s SUHD lineup looks terrific in terms of image quality, and Samsung’s sets generally churn out the best-looking video in the business. Still, all this hubbub about 4K sets getting cheap doesn’t apply to the company’s best offerings, even if they are based on cheaper tech than OLED.

But the bird’s eye view is a wonderful trend. It’s great to see the TV industry shift focus back to picture quality. After the past few years of 3D TVs, remote-control gimmicks, and curvy screens (oh wait, that one still exists), manufacturers have strayed from what matters most. With a 4K transition in the works, promising technologies like HDR and quantum dot gaining momentum, and LG’s incredible 2015 TV lineup bound to compete with these Samsung SUHDs in terms of quality and price, the big picture for consumers is nicely calibrated.

Comcast Says It’ll Bring Ultra-Fast Internet to US by 2016

Comcast says it will soon compete head-on with Google Fiber.

In a blog post today, the company announced plans to offer internet speeds of up to 2 gigabits per second to the majority of its nearly 22 million subscribers by the end of the year. That’s about twice as fast as the ultra-high-speed service Google is now offering in three US cities, and 80 times as fast as Comcast’s standard broadband internet plan.

“We’ll first offer this service in Atlanta and roll it out in additional cities soon with the goal to have it available across the country and available to about 18 million homes by the end of the year,” the blog post says.

Most remaining customers who aren’t able to take advantage of the two-gigabit service will eventually be offered Google-like one-gigabit speeds over traditional coaxial cable, according to the post.

Google began rolling out its one-gigabit fiber service more than two years ago, saying it wanted to push other ISPs into offering faster internet speeds. And this is now happening, at least on some level. For Google and others, the hope is that faster speeds will not only improve the performance of today’s internet application, from Facebook to Netflix, but also engender a whole new wave of more advanced online applications.

The rub is that Comcast’s offer may not result in widespread use of high-speed fiber. It must still lay fiber to individual homes, and customers may be asked to incur the cost—something they may not be willing to do.

The Price of Fiber

Comcast hasn’t discussed pricing for its new service. The company’s XFINITY Extreme 505 service costs $399.95 per month and offers speeds of about half a gigabit. However, competition from Google Fiber, which is planned to expand into Atlanta, may drive down prices in some areas. We’ve already seen this from AT&T, which offers gigabit fiber connections for $70 a month in Austin, Texas, where it competes with Google Fiber, but $110 in Cupertino, where it doesn’t.

The real sticking point may the the setup costs. Comcast already has fiber optic pipe running through much of the country, but providing links from these pipes into people’s homes—so-called “last mile” connections—could be an expensive process. Google has largely defrayed these costs by focusing on rolling out the service one neighborhood at a time to areas in which many people have signed up in advance.

What Comcast is promising is a service that will be widely available to everyone within proximity to its pipes, which suggests it will install the service on a per-household basis. While offering nation- and city-wide service sounds radical, if the costs are so high that only a few people can afford to have service installed, it becomes a much less impressive.

For those not within proximity of Comcast’s fiber optic pipes, the company is experimenting with a new hybrid cable/fiber solution called DOCSIS. “We hope to begin rolling out DOCSIS 3.1 in early 2016,” the blog post says. “And when fully deployed, it will mean almost every customer in our footprint will be able to receive gigabit speeds over our existing network.” That should be considerably less expensive to install since it will rely on the company’s existing infrastructure, but Comcast is being much less specific about who will receive this service and when.

Time Warner Deal Looms

But if Comcast is successful, it could be the first nationwide gigabit capable residential internet provider. Google Fiber has been expanding into more cities but is still, at present, only available in three metro areas, and is only available in select neighborhoods in those cities.

Likewise, other telcos like CenturyLink and AT&T have announced gigabit services in a select neighborhoods in a few cities. As mentioned, this helps keep costs down, but it drastically limits access. This would be the first time higher speeds have been widely available virtually everywhere that Comcast already services.

The announcement comes as Comcast angles to take over Time Warner Cable, a deal that is still pending approval by the Federal Communications Commission. The merger has been met with widespread opposition from consumer advocacy groups, and the FCC has delayed its decision to mid-2015, sparking speculation that the deal is dead in the water. But if Comcast can make the case that by taking over Time Warner Cable that it will be able to offer Google Fiber level speeds to even more customers, it might have an easier time swaying the courts.

From Two to Ten

It’s impossible know what the applications for such fast speeds would be. The ideas produced thus far have been largely banal. But that’s largely a chicken and egg problem, since there are so few people with fast enough speeds to take advantage of such services. As gigabit speed internet connections become more widely available, we can expect a whole new generation of innovations to take root.

And from there? Well, Google is already thinking about 10 gigabit services.

Retro City Rampage Gets Limited-Edition Physical Release on PlayStation Vita

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Hate downloading games? Or do you just want a physical memento of Retro City Rampage, the 8-bit styled homage to games like Grand Theft Auto?

Retro City is available as a downloadable game on many platforms, but its creator Brian Provinciano has worked with Sony to do a limited-edition run of physical PlayStation Vita editions. A previous run of physical editions of the PlayStation 4 game sold out quickly and now sell for $150 on eBay.

No guarantees that the Vita version will see a similar price spike, but if you want one at the actual retail price of $30, it would probably be best to get it now.

Microbes scared to death by virus presence

The microbes could surrender to the harmless virus, but instead freeze in place, dormant, waiting for their potential predator to go away, according to a recent study in mBio.

University of Illinois researchers found that Sulfolobus islandicus can go dormant, ceasing to grow and reproduce, in order to protect themselves from infection by Sulfolobus spindle-shaped virus 9 (SSV9). The dormant microbes are able to recover if the virus goes away within 24 to 48 hours--otherwise they die.

"The microbe is hedging its bet," said Associate Professor of Microbiology Rachel Whitaker, who led the research at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. "If they go dormant, they might die, but we think this must be better than getting infected and passing it on."

Sulfolobus is a species of archaea (a domain of single-celled organisms distinct from bacteria) found in acidic hot springs all over the world, where free viruses are not as common as in other environments. These microbes will go dormant in the presence of just a few viruses, whether active or inactive. While inactivated virus particles cannot infect a host, Whitaker's lab found they could still cause dormancy, and ultimately, death in Sulfolobus.

"People thought these inactivated viruses were just an accident, that they were just mispackaged," Whitaker said. "Now we know they are being sensed by the host so they are having an effect. People are starting to think that it is adaptive for the virus to produce inactivated virus particles."

Sulfolobus have an adaptive immune system found in archaea and bacteria that allows the microbe to encode a specific piece of DNA that matches the viral DNA, causing it to target the viral DNA and degrade it thus preventing the virus from propagating, or reproducing. Cultures with immunity to SSV9 recover from dormancy and grow normally once the virus is removed from the culture. Microbes without this immunity are susceptible to infection and eventually kill their neighbors by maintaining viral particles in the environment.

The researchers do not know exactly what is going on while the microbes are dormant, only that the microbes look drastically different in that state. More research is needed to better understand these new interactions between microbes and viruses. Incorporating these findings into models will show the true ecological impact of viruses in the microbial world, Whitaker said.

"We really don't understand the way that viruses affect microbes," Whitaker said. "There is a lot to learn. These communities are usually modeled where a virus will either kill the microbe or the microbe is resistant. But actually there are all these other subtleties going on, like dormancy, that are having a bigger impact than we understand."

Dormant microbes are found everywhere, in water, soil, and even the human gut, said Maria Bautista, a graduate student in Whitaker's lab, who led the research.

"Many microbes go dormant when they face environmental stress such as a change in pH or temperature " Bautista said. "Maybe virus-induced dormancy is something that doesn't just happen in Sulfolobus; it may be a widespread response to viruses in other environments. We don't know."

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . The original article was written by Claire Sturgeon. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.