Describes motivation process for creativity with emphasis on intrinsic motivation by Corey K Katir

Crawling my way to a healthier immune system.

Bacteria are practically everywhere around us, including on and inside you, but that is in many ways a good thing. For instance, having a diverse set of microbes living on your skin might help prevent allergies. A new study published in PNASA links two factors related to how microbes might affect our health: the observation that diversity of microbes on a person is related to the diversity of microbes in their environment, and the hygiene hypothesis, which suggests that the modern uptick in allergies and autoimmune diseases is caused by childhood under-exposure to bacteria.

For a while now, scientists have known that kids living on farms are less likely to have allergies or asthma. Being around livestock means the farm kids are also around a more diverse set of bacteria than city kids living in an apartment. In this new study, scientists swabbed the skin bacteria of 118 Finnish kids, some who lived in rural areas and some who lived in urban areas. They also tested the kids for levels of an antibody called IgE, high levels of which indicate hypersensitivity to allergens, or what is …

A few days ago, news reports claimed that 16 per cent of cancers around the world were caused by infections. This isnat an especially new or controversial statement, as thereas clear evidence that some viruses, bacteria and parasites can cause cancer (think HPV, which we now have a vaccine against). Itas not inaccurate either. The paper that triggered the reports did indeed conclude that aof the 12.7 million new cancer cases that occurred in 2008, the population attributable fraction (PAF) for infectious agents was 16A*1%a.

But for me, the reports aggravated an old itch. I used to work at a cancer charity. We’d get frequent requests for such numbers (e.g. how many cancers are caused by tobacco?). However, whenever such reports actually came out, we got a lot confused questions and comments. The problem is that many (most?) people have no idea what it actually means to say that X% of cancers are caused by something, where those numbers come from, or how they should be used.

Formally, these numbers a the population attributable fractions (PAFs) a represent the proportion of cases of a disease that could be avoided …

Where viruses and bacteria cause cancer

Strictly speaking, cancer is not contagious.A But a fair number of cancers are clearly caused by viral or bacterial infections: lymphomas can be triggered by the Epstein-Barr virus, which also causes mononucleosis.A Liver cancers can be caused byA Hepatitis B andA C. Cervical cancers can be caused by human papillomavirus, the major reason behind the development of a vaccine against it. A For some of these cancers, nearly 100% of the cases have an infectious link—when researchers check to see if a virus or bacterium is working in the tumor or has left signs of its presence in a patient’s blood, the answer is nearly always yes.

A new paperA in The Lancet takes a look at the very best data on the prevalence of infection-caused cancers and comes up with some striking numbers. Overall, they estimate that 16% of cancer cases worldwide in 2008 had an infectious cause—2 million out of 12.7 million.

Hepatitis B and C, HPV, andA Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium that triggers stomach cancer, caused the lion’s share of those cases, about 1.9 million together. Eighty percent of all infection-caused cancers were in less developed regions, …

It’s an exciting time for ecologists who study microbes. DNA sequencing has grown so cheap and fast that they can run around identifying bacteria living just about anywhere they can reach with a cotton swab. Turns out, bacteria are everywhere, even in the cleanest houses, and scientists are starting to wonder: do those bacteria in the home reflect the bacteria that live inside the inhabitants?

And if so, can they travel from person to person?

A small insight into this question came at one of the presentations at the International Human Microbiome Congress (covered by New Scientist in a short piece here). James Scott, who studies molecular genetics at the University of Toronto, reported that the gut microbes of babies, as found in their poop, were also in the dust in the babies’ homes. It’s not clear whether this means that bacteria in the dust are colonizing the babies or vice versa—or both—but it’s still something of a surprise. Gut microbes don’t seem like the sort to thrive outside the body, as they tend to require an oxygen-free environment. But maybe the gut bacteria in the dust are in a dormant form, waiting to be absorbed into …

Many insects eventually evolve to resist insecticides. This process typically takes many generations and involves tweaks to the insectas genes. But there is a quicker route. Japanese scientists have found that a bean bug can become instantly resistant to a common insecticide by swallowing the right bacteria.

The bug forms an alliance with Burkholderia bacteria, and can harbour up to 100 million of these microbes in a special organ in its gut (see arrow above). Some strains of Burkholderia can break down the insecticide fenitrothion, detoxifying it into forms that are harmless to insects. In fields where the chemical is sprayed, these pesticide-breaking bacteria rise in number. And if bugs swallow them, they become immune to the otherwise deadly chemical.

Iave written about this story for The Scientist, so head over there to read the details of the study.

To me, the alliance is fascinating because the bug is coping with a new environmental challenge by bolstering its own genome with that of a microbe.

Many creatures rely on microscopic partners to safeguard their health. Insects inherit beneficial bacteria from their mothers, which help them to resist other bacteria that would cause disease, …

Yesterday my Fresh Air interview was broadcast. You can listen to it here. I’ve been lots of emails with follow-up questions, and it occurred to me that I really ought to gather up some links to more information about the topics I discussed.

If I haven’t addressed a question you had listening to the show, leave a comment to this post and I’ll add a link.

Antivirals:
My feature in Wired on the search for antiviral drugs

The “virome”–the viruses that live in our body:
A Loom post about the swarms of viruses in the mouth, where they kill off bacteria
An article in Nature about a study of the viruses in identical twins

The microbiome
My article in the New York Times
My essay on the Loom about medical ecology
My Wired atlas of the human ecosystem
An example of microbiome research: extreme navel gazing
Maryn McKenna’s story in Scientific American on the struggle to mainstream fecal transplants to treat deadly infections
Ed Yong’s oeuvre on the microbiome at Not Exactly Rocket Science
Mayrn McKenna on her blog at Wired writing on the link between beneficial …

Your laziest days are positively frenetic compared to the lifestyle of some deep-sea bacteria, buried in the sediments of the Pacific Ocean. These microbes are pushing a slow-going lifestyle to an extreme. They subsist on vanishingly low levels of oxygen, in sediments that have not received any new food sources since the time of the dinosaurs. And yes, they survive.

Not only that, but these microbes could make up 90 per cent of those on the planet. aWeare looking at the most common forms of life on this planet, and we know almost nothing about them,a said Hans RA,y, who has been studying them for many years. Now, RA,y has finally measured just how slow their metabolism really is.

Iave written about this discovery for The Scientist, so head over there for the full story.

Image by Shelly Carpenter, NOAA Ocean Explorer

The Earthas earliest days were largely free of oxygen. Then, around 2.5 billion years ago, primitive bacteria started to flood the atmosphere with this vital gas. They produced it in the process of harnessing the sunas energy to make their own nutrients, just as plants do today. The building oxygen levels reddened the planet, as black iron minerals oxidised into rusty hues. They also killed off most of the worldas microbes, which were unable to cope with this new destructive gas. And in the survivors of this planetary upheaval, lifeas first clock began to tick and tock.

Today, all life on Earth runs on internal clocks. These acircadian rhythmsa are the reason we feel sleepy at night, and why our hormones, temperature and hunger levels rise and fall with a 24-hour cycle. Theyare molecular metronomes that keep the events inside our bodies ticking in time with the world around us.

Until now, it seemed that the major branches of the tree of life each had their own timekeeping systems, evolved independently of the others. But Akhilesh Reddy and John OaNeill from the University of Cambridge have disproved that …

A child from the village of Chamba in rural Malawi has very little in common with one living in the city of Philadelphia in the USA. They eat different food, speak different languages, and enjoy different lifestyles. But they are both united by the fact that they are vessels for teeming hordes of bacteria.

These children, like all of us, are home to trillions of bacteria and other microbes. These passengers outnumber our own cells by ten to one, and their genes outnumber ours by a hundred to one. Collectively, theyare known as the microbiome, and they are as much a part of us as any one of our own organs. They break down our food, safeguard our health, and affect our minds. And they have become intensely fashionable.

Microbiome research is booming, fuelled by the realisation that these microbes might provide a deeper understanding of our bodies, and new ways of diagnosing or treating diseases. But, with some exceptions, most microbiome studies have focused on wealthy populations from Europe, North America and Japan. Thereas a risk that the bacteria of people from the developing …

For almost a decade, Jillian Banfield has been travelling to a place that apushes the limits of human endurancea a Richmond Mine in Northern California. Its abandoned caverns can reach 48 degrees Celsius and 100 per cent humidity. They are low in oxygen. They contain possibly the most acidic naturally occurring water on Earth, with a pH value of -3.6.

But even in these conditions, there is life. Bacteria grow within the cave, floating in thin films on top of its hot, acidic water. They are the lords of their extreme world, and they provide an unrivalled opportunity to study how wild microbes evolve.

The mine ecosystem is extremely simple. The dominant species is a bacterium called Leptospirillum that lives in sulphuric acid and eats iron. Only a handful of other microbes share the mine, and most migrants would simply die. This is an ideal community for keen scientists a itas small, well-defined, not very diverse, and self-contained. aThe fact that it’s a simple, closed community makes it feasible to observe the evolution of the main players, without worrying about genotypes coming in from outside,a says Richard …

Many insects eventually evolve to resist insecticides. This process typically takes many generations and involves tweaks to the insectas genes. But there is a quicker route. Japanese scientists have found that a bean bug can become instantly resistant to a common insecticide by swallowing the right bacteria.

The bug forms an alliance with Burkholderia bacteria, and can harbour up to 100 million of these microbes in a special organ in its gut (see arrow above). Some strains of Burkholderia can break down the insecticide fenitrothion, detoxifying it into forms that are harmless to insects. In fields where the chemical is sprayed, these pesticide-breaking bacteria rise in number. And if bugs swallow them, they become immune to the otherwise deadly chemical.

Iave written about this story for The Scientist, so head over there to read the details of the study.

To me, the alliance is fascinating because the bug is coping with a new environmental challenge by bolstering its own genome with that of a microbe.

Many creatures rely on microscopic partners to safeguard their health. Insects inherit beneficial bacteria from their mothers, which help them to resist other bacteria that would cause disease, …

The bacteria in the faeces of sea lion are capable of making iron and phosphorous available to phytoplankton, the research found.

Image: zimdingo1/iStockphoto

The coating can be used to keep biomedical and consumer products free of bacteria without antibiotics, which no longer kill resistant ‘superbugs’.

Image: Eraxion/iStockphoto

Scientists using nanotechology have created the first cavity-filling composite that kills harmful bacteria and regenerates tooth structure lost to bacterial decay. This first-of-a-kind nanocomposite will be tested in animal teeth then human volunteers next.

The culprit behind a failed hip or knee replacements might be found in the mouth. DNA testing of bacteria from the fluid that lubricates hip and knee joints had bacteria with the same DNA as the plaque from patients with gum disease and in need of a joint replacement.

Oral bacteria that escape into the bloodstream are able to cause blood clots and trigger life-threatening endocarditis. Further research could lead to new drugs to tackle infective heart disease, say scientists.

According to a new study, smoking causes the body to turn against its own helpful bacteria, leaving smokers more vulnerable to disease.

Stripping some mouth bacteria of their access key to gangs of other pathogenic oral bacteria could help prevent gum disease and tooth loss. The study suggests that this bacterial access key could be a drug target for people who are at high risk of developing gum disease.

Scientists are reporting identification of two substances in licorice — used extensively in Chinese traditional medicine — that kill the major bacteria responsible for tooth decay and gum disease, the leading causes of tooth loss in children and adults. In a new study, they say that these substances could have a role in treating and preventing tooth decay and gum disease.

Researchers have uncovered the molecular tricks used by bacteria to fight the effects of fluoride, which is commonly used in toothpaste and mouthwash to combat tooth decay.

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