Thanks.

I believe you :)

A new paper published in the journal Icarus is suggesting that the best way for an extraterrestrial civilization to communicate across stellar distances is to send messages embedded within genetic code. It’s an interesting take on the panspermia hypothesis, one the scientists hope will lead to “biological SETI.”

The authors of the paper, Vladimir Shcherbak and Maxim Makukov, summarize their argument like this:

The code is a flexible mapping between codons [the initial nucleotide from which translation starts] and amino acids, and this flexibility allows modifying the code artificially. But once fixed, the code might stay unchanged over cosmological timescales; in fact, it is the most durable construct known. Therefore it represents an exceptionally reliable storage for an intelligent signature.

In regards to the potential for random mutations and garbled messages, the scientists claim that, if a mutation occurs in tRNA or aaRS, thus leading to a messing up of the genetic code, all genes in the genome will still remain written with the previous code, and the cell will quickly disappear from the scene without progeny:

The chances that such mutation in tRNA/aaRS is accompanied by corresponding mutations in coding genes all over the genome resulting in unaltered proteins are vanishingly small, given that there are dozens of such codons in thousands of genes in a genome. Thus, the machinery of the genetic code experiences exceptionally strong purifying selection that keeps it unchanged over billions of years.

The intelligent signature, say Shcherbak and Makukov, could be delivered through space and time. Consequently, they conclude that our genetic code “may have been invented outside the solar system already several billion years ago.”

To prove the theory, scientists would have to find patterns in the DNA that couldn’t have formed naturally. Terrestrial code, they say, may “display a thorough precision-type orderliness matching the criteria to be considered an informational signal.” Simple arrangements of the code could reveal a series of mathematical and “ideographical” patterns of symbolic language.

Shcherbak and Makukov are not the first to come up with this idea. And in fact, it’s a theory that’s been around since the 1970s. There have even been some early efforts to find some kind of code or message in our DNA. Paul Davies recently made the case for “Genomic SETI” back in 2010. But credit where credit is due: This is the most thorough investigation of the topic I’ve seen to date.

Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re correct. There are several things to consider.

First, it is not immediately obvious that this is in fact the most efficient way of communicating across cosmological distances. If anything, it seems like a convoluted and overly-complex method. What’s more, other communication schemes, like self-replicating Bracewell probes or concentrated beams of laser light, may make more sense.

Second, the panspermia hypothesis has yet to be proven. In the meantime, Darwinian natural selection and some (admittedly) unknown chemistry remain the axioms in charge.

Lastly, other biological and chemical reproductive processes may exist, or may even be more practical. Moreover, this schema would limit extraterrestrials to communicating with planets with the same biochemistry as ours. For us, that means L-amino acids, protein synthesis based on the same genetic code, and so on.

At any rate, it’s a fascinating paper, and plenty of food for thought.

Read it here.

Image: ieti.org.

In 2010, award-winning artist and photographer Seth Taras put together these stunning blended images for the History Channel as part of their "Know Where You Stand" campaign.

All images Seth Taras/History Channel. Top: Lakehurst, New Jersey, USA 1937/2004.

Saint-Laurent-sur-Mec, Normandy, France 1944/2004.

The terrace of the Palais de Chaillot, Paris, 1940/2004.

On the Strasse des siebzehnten Juni, Berlin 1989/2004.

H/t Twisted Swifter via PetaPixel.

Looks like someone wanted this pretty badly: The letter that Francis Crick wrote to his son describing the structural detail of DNA has sold for a record breaking $5.3m at a New York City auction. That's more than $4m over the initial asking price.

It's really not that difficult to understand why someone would pay so much; the handwritten letter is truly a special item. It's even been compared to the heads up letter that Albert Einstein wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt warning about the potential for atomic weapons (which sold for just over $2m back in 2002).

The Crick letter is now the highest ever sold at an action, eclipsing an 1864 Abraham Lincoln letter that sold in April 2008 for $3.4m.

Crick wrote the letter on March 19th, 1953, to his 12-year-old son while he was still in boarding school. The letter opens: "Dear Michael, Jim Watson and I have probably made a most important discovery." He described the structure of DNA as something "beautiful," and that it was the copying mechanism "by which life comes from life." The letter even included a crude sketch of DNA's double helix structure.

"Read this carefully so that you will understand it," he concludes. "When you come home we will show you the model. Lots of love, Daddy."

The entire transcript can be read here.

The letter is among a dozen other items Crick's heirs are selling to benefit scientific research. Proceeds will be sent to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla and the new Francis Crick Institute in London, a medical research institute due to open in 2015.

Sources: Guardian, LiveScience, New York Times.

In a much needed breakthrough, neuroscientists have developed a technique to predict how much physical pain people are feeling by looking at images of their brain scans.

Until this point, the only way for doctors to "measure" pain is by using a pain scale. This typically involves patient self-reporting — like ranking pain on a scale from 1 to 10 — and observing their behavior.

This can be problematic when doctors have to make important clinical decisions. Patients in pain are notorious for both understating and overstating their degree of pain. Also, some patients may be incapacitated in some way and unable to properly articulate their level of discomfort.

What’s more, there is no unified or industry-standard pain scale currently in use; there are over 20 different scales that are utilized in different jurisdictions and contexts. The lack of consensus on this issue points to how difficult it is to measure what is essentially phenomenological quale — the individualized or subjective experience of pain.

Looking to contribute to ongoing efforts to measure pain, neuroscientists from the University of Colorado Boulder, New York University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Michigan set about the task of using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify objective measures of pain. Their findings now appear in the New England Journal of Medicine.

By looking at the brain scans of 114 participants, the researchers developed a technique to measure and predict pain intensity — and remarkably, at the level of the individual person.

For the experiment, each volunteer was subjected to a painful dose of heat. The experience would leave a pattern, or neurologic signature, for the neuroscientists to study (they used machine-learning analyses to identify a pattern of fMRI activity across a wide series of brain regions).

The signatures were distinguished from other sensory experiences, like nonpainful warmth, pain anticipation, and pain recall. They also found that painkillers helped to reduce the severity of the signatures.

The neuroscientists, a team led by CU-Boulder’s Tor Wager, discovered that the signatures in question are transferable across different people, allowing them to predict pain intensity with over 95% accuracy.

Interestingly, the scientists also measured “social pain.” Some volunteers were shown photographs of romantic partners they had recently broken up with. But this kind of emotional pain did not correspond to the signatures left behind by the physical pain.

Looking ahead, it will be some time yet before physicians can quantify physical pain at the clinical setting. But this is a good sign that the day may eventually arrive.

Images: Shutterstock//Chepko Danil Vitalevich; Tor Wager.

If you think human teens take crazy risks, get a load of what fledgling birds do to get that little extra scrap of food. By throwing themselves out of their nest too early and exposing themselves to predators, the young birds force a change in how they get fed.

Scientists recently observed this behavior when studying pied babblers, and they're calling it the blackmail hypothesis. During their fledgling stage — a kind of adolescence for birds — they can't fly or feed themselves, but they're old enough to start making trouble for mom and dad, their sole food providers.

When they want more food, they leave the nest early — an extremely dangerous move that threatens their own destruction, but increases the provisioning rate offered by their parents. Because they're on the ground, where their parents do most of their foraging, the birds get more food — maybe just because they're closer. But the study also found that adult birds who heard calls from other species, which signaled a possible predator nearby, fed their offspring on the ground more but didn't change how much they fed their offspring in nests. The parents may figure that well-fed offspring are less likely to take crazy chances, and more likely to get under shelter.

And paradoxically, the kids may know that jumping from the nest at the time of maximum danger means more food, in the end. So, by putting themselves in danger, they put pressure on the adults. Sounds suspiciously human.

Read the entire study at Proceedings of the Royal Society B: "The influence of fledgling location on adult provisioning: a test of the blackmail hypothesis." [via Discover]

Image: Eleroux/Shutterstock.

Prompted by a recent article in Aeon Magazine warning of the threat posed by advanced artificial intelligence, Kristin Centorcelli of SF Signal put together an impressive panel of renowned science fiction authors to get their opinions on the subject.

If you haven’t read the Aeon article, you really should. It was one of the more important think pieces published on the subject in quite some time.

As the Future of Humanity Institute’s David Dewey noted in the piece, “If you had a machine that was designed specifically to make inferences about the world, instead of a machine like the human brain, you could make discoveries...much faster,” but an AI “might want to do certain things with matter in order to achieve a goal, things like building giant computers, or other large-scale engineering projects. Those things might involve intermediary steps, like tearing apart the Earth to make huge solar panels.”

Indeed, the threat of an AI run amok is something we're also concerned about.

To see what the science fiction community has to say about all this, Centorcelli invited a number of writers, including Larry Niven, Karl Schroeder, Madeline Ashby, Wesley Chu, Guy Hasson, Gregg Rosenblum, James Lovegrove, Guy Haley, Jason M. Hough, James K. Decker, and Neal Asher.

Somewhat surprisingly, most responses were critical — and even a bit dismissive — of what they perceived as a “sky is falling” tone. For many writers, the threat is neither real or properly contextualized. But some definitely see problems on the horizon.

Here’s a quick taste what they had to say:

Wesley Chu:

Yes, future apocalyptic extinction sucks and sounds pretty unpleasant, but if I may, when was the last time any futurist’s prediction actually came true? They predicted flying cars in every family’s garage back in the 1920s. Nearly a hundred years later, cars aren’t drastically different than they were since the days of the Model T. We still don’t have a moon base, and my cleaning lady is composed of skin, bones, and blood, albeit I admit she sounds like a robot when she talks. Hell, we can’t even get a guy to Mars let alone the next solar system. We can’t even cure the common cold. Basically, the track record for futurists kind of suck. And the further out we get in the predictions, the less likely any of them will hit their mark.

Karl Schroder:

Anderson et al. have suffered a failure of imagination. They’ve succeeded in imagining artificial intelligence but failed to imagine the more important innovation, which would be Artificial Desire. Once you’ve pictured AD, it becomes immediately obvious that the ‘problem’ of autonomous AI is no problem at all. –Or, rather, an autonomous self-interested AI is a completely avoidable design failure.

Gregg Rosenblum:

I have to say, at the risk of sounding wishy-washy, that I think we’re going to get a mixed bag of positives and negatives from AI technology. We’re going to have bots defusing land mines and fighting fires but also dropping bombs from unmanned drones. We’ll probably have AI cars driving without human guidance (we’ve already got self-parking cars, right?), but we’re also going to have an interesting, “transhumanism” cyborg-like blurring of the lines between technology and humanity. (Google Glass is just the tip of the iceberg—how many of us, for example, if we could have a comm. chip implanted in us that acted as a smart phone, would jump at the chance?)

James Lovegrove:

The problems may come if we somehow generate an AI that is so far above our ways of thinking that it becomes unknowable. Then we’re looking at a “god AI” whose mental processes are so alien to us that all we can do is bow down in subjection before it and venerate it, in the hope that it won’t become a vengeful deity and smite us all. I can easily foresee churches springing up full of worshippers of this AI and a priest caste seizing power and holding sway by being able to – or at least trying to – interpret the mind and meaning of our new computer deity. Perhaps it’ll promise us a virtual reality afterlife if we behave. The lucky, saved few will have their brain patterns uploaded into a hard-drive heaven and live for eternity as digital souls.

Guy Haley:

I reckon a greater danger comes from unthinking machines, set loose to do a mindless task, that rather like the brooms in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, cannot be stopped. The ecophagy “gray goo” scenario from Eric Drexler’s novel Engines of Creation or the robots sent to terraform Mars that end up disassembling it in Stephen Baxter’s Evolution.

James K. Decker:

If we’re talking about a true intelligence, some kind of self-aware network of synthetic neurons and not some kind of ‘human simulation’, I don’t see how we could have the slightest idea what it might do once it became conscious. We’d be interacting with a completely inhuman intelligence, free of empathy, or even an understanding of what life and death are. The things that are core to us as humans would mean nothing to a being like that and so given the chance to act in our world, we could have no way of guessing what it might decide to do. Even if it were somehow keyed to be beneficial to us, taking the “maximizing human happiness” example from the original question, a machine intelligence might decide the optimal way to do this would be to keep every human immobilized, and hooked up to a feeding tube with a wire running current to our pleasure centers. That would make every human happy for their entire lives, and without the ability to understand why that would be horrible it might seem like the most efficient course of action.

Neal Asher:

Yes, our computers are able to process so much more every day but AIs they are not. And if they suddenly do turn into demigods, how exactly are they going to change the world? It’s all very well having vast intelligence but if you can’t even pick up a screwdriver it isn’t going to do much good. Sorry to be blunt, but go ask Stephen Hawking about that.

There’s tons more to this discussion at SF Signal.

Image: Shutterstock/agsandrew.

Archaeologists have discovered a massive 54,000 ton pile of basalt under the Sea of Galilee off the Israeli coast. The cone-shaped structure may have been an ancient burial ground.

According to researcher Yitzhak Paz, the structure was originally discovered in 2003 by sonar, but divers have now been sent down to investigate. The object, which is twice the size of Stonehenge and built around the same time, could be as much as 4,000 years old. It measures 10 meters (32 feet) in height and about 70 meters (230 feet) across.

The archaeologists believe it may have been a cairn — a massive pile of rocks used to mark burials.

"Close inspection by scuba diving revealed that the structure is made of basalt boulders up to a metre long with no apparent construction pattern," researchers said. "The boulders have natural faces with no signs of cutting or chiselling. Similarly, we did not find any sign of arrangement or walls that delineate this structure."

Interestingly, the site sits close to the now-defunct ancient outlet of the Jordan River — an area that had economic importance in the area during the Bronze Age.

The researchers speculate that the structure was built on dry land, but has since been covered by the sea. Alternately, it could have been constructed under water as a way to attract fish.

Check out the study (pdf) at the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.

That haircut is now going to be all the rage among Asiatic Black bears.

I have a strong suspicion that far more than 9% of io9 readers would have sex with a robot.

I don't normally get creeped out, but this sends a chill down my spine. Millions of 'em!

A recent survey conducted by the Huffington Post and YouGov shows that we’re surprisingly open to the idea of having carnal relations with mechanical companions.

And the poll was fairly legit. YouGov surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults from February 20th to 21st, and the sample group factored in demographic characteristics like age, race, gender, education, income, interest in politics, and religion.

Results of the survey can be found here (pdf).

In response to questions about robotic sex partners, here’s what they found:

Eighteen percent of respondents indicated that they believed sexbots will be available by 2030. Nine percent indicated that they would have sex with a robot if they could (though perhaps they wouldn't have been keen on admitting that if they could).

Sex with a robot raises some thorny ethical questions — including whether a married person who hooked up with a robot would be guilty of infidelity. What did the poll find? Forty-two percent of Americans indicated that such a dalliance would constitute cheating. Another 31 percent said it wouldn't, and 26 percent said they were unsure. Respondents under age 30 were almost as likely to say it wouldn't be cheating (34 percent) as that it would (36 percent). Americans over age 65 were far more likely to say that it would, by a 52 percent to 24 percent margin.

The poll also looked into the comfort level people have when it comes to personal service robots.

Nearly 60% of Americans predicted that robots will be cleaning homes by 2030, but only 33% said they’d want a robot servant; 42% said they didn’t want one. Interestingly, age was a factor; people between 40 and 44 were most likely to say they would like a robot servant, while adults 65 and older were more likely to say no thanks.

Images: Here and here.

A three-year-old Asiatic Black bear named Champa has just undergone successful surgery to remove a buildup of water in her brain. It marks the first time in medical history that a bear has been given such a procedure.

Champa has lived most of her life at a northern Laos sanctuary run by Free the Bears, an Australian conservation group that protects bears from wildlife traffickers. Asiatic Black bears are hunted for their bile — a valuable ingredient in traditional Chinese and Korean medicine.

She was rescued when still a cub, but Champa’s handlers soon noticed she had a protruding forehead and had difficulty socializing with other bears. Eventually, the growth slowed, but her behavior became increasingly erratic and her vision faded.

Veterinarians diagnosed her as having hydrocephalus — water on the brain.

Because it’s against Buddhist tradition to euthanize animals, the sanctuary staff arranged for a specialist, Romain Pizzi, to perform a technique called “keyhole” or laparoscopic surgery in which a small incision is made with the help of a small camera.

And indeed, Champa was in good hands; Pizzi has performed similar surgeries on other nonhuman animals, including seals, reindeer, and jaguars. In preparation, Pizzi talked to pediatric surgeons, studied bear skulls and brains, and looked at the brains of a hydrocephalic otter and fox.

The procedure lasted six hours (details here). At one point a medical pump short-circuited on account of the high humidity, and Pizzi had to resort to a mattress pump to keep the bear’s abdomen inflated.

Soon after the surgery, Champa could finally raise her head to look directly at sanctuary staff. Though they can’t be entirely certain, the staff also suspects that her vision has improved. But her headaches appear to be gone, she’s gained weight, and she’s now more sociable with other bears.

Source: National Geographic.

Image: Matt Hunt via National Geographic.

When I was in my early 20s, my arm became infected after being stung by a bee. That same evening, I suffered from tremendous itching and burning the likes I had never experienced. When I awoke, my entire forearm was ablaze in the color red. Recognizing that something was wrong I immediately rushed to the nearest walk-in clinic where the doctor who received me could not hide his shock.

His reaction was telling; if not treated soon and with the appropriate dose of antibiotics I could be in big trouble. He made me promise that I would adhere to the medication regimen. Further, he pulled out a big black magic marker and drew an outline around the infection. I was to visit him the next day at which time he could determine if the infection was still spreading or not. So joke — had the bacteria spread to other parts of my body and infect other regions, I may very well have died.

That should read "So *no* joke — had the bacteria spread..."

"Trapped in the vice-like grips of robot lips."

More and more diseases are becoming resistant to antibiotics. Within a few decades, we’ll enter the “post-antibiotic era,” a time when even the most routine infections could threaten our lives. It’s a frightening prospect — but we may have some novel bacteria-fighting tricks up our sleeve.

Antibiotics, also known as antimicrobials, have been called a “miracle cure” — and for good reason. When these bacteria-fighting drugs were first introduced to the public in the 1940s they became an instant game-changer. Widespread infections could suddenly be treated with astounding efficacy, warding off blights like syphilis, gonorrhoea, leprosy, and tuberculosis. This medical revolution resulted in an increase in overall human lifespan.

The first antibiotic, penicillin, was developed by the Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming in 1928. As a term, “antibiotics” was originally used to describe any natural compound produced by a microorganism or fungus that could kill disease-causing bacteria in humans and animals. These days, antibiotics can describe any compound, including synthetics, that can either destroy or prevent the growth of dangerous microbes.

Antibiotic resistance

The problem, however, has been the dramatic rise of antibiotic resistant (AR) strains of bacteria. As anyone with even the most rudimentary understanding of Darwinian processes knows, the use of antibiotics results in a selectional process whereby hardy and drug-resistant microbes survive and breed; they’re simply adapting.

Now, some 70 years after their advent, antibiotics are starting to fail with disturbing regularity.

Each year, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) — a particularly nasty and highly-adaptable strain — causes at least seven million primary-care and ER visits, infects hundreds of thousands of people, and kills 19,000. Biologist Maryn McKenna describes it a “wily, infinitely adaptable bacterium” — a bug that, owing to its millennia of evolutionary history with us, “bristles with defenses against our immune systems.”

Image: Clusters of MRSA bacteria as seen through a scanning electron micrograph. Credit: Annie Cavanagh.

In addition, there are now AR strains of E. coli, tuberculosis, and gonorrhoea (against which there is only one antibiotic left that works). NDM-1, another dangerous strain to consider, is resistant to one of the more powerful groups of drugs, carbapenem antibiotics, and it has been detected in U.K. patients.

Two years ago, 25,000 Europeans died of bacterial infections that were resistant to antibiotics.

Reacting to this trend, the World Health Organization has warned that “the world is on the brink of losing these miracle cures.” Looking to the near future, the organization worries that many common infections will cease to have a cure and, “once again, kill unabated.” It notes that the rate at which antibiotic drugs are being supplanted by AR bacteria lags behind the development of replacement drugs. And it’s not just about hospital “superbugs” — this is an issue that pertains to even the most common microbes.

Life after antibiotics

So what will happen when the drugs stop working? The Guardian’s Sarah Boseley explains:

• Transplant surgery becomes virtually impossible. Organ recipients have to take immune-suppressing drugs for life to stop rejection of a new heart or kidney. Their immune systems cannot fight off life-threatening infections without antibiotics.

• Removing a burst appendix becomes a dangerous operation once again. Patients are routinely given antibiotics after surgery to prevent the wound becoming infected by bacteria. If bacteria get into the bloodstream, they can cause life-threatening septicaemia.

• Pneumonia becomes once more "the old man's friend". Antibiotics have stopped it being the mass-killer it once was, particularly among the old and frail, who would lapse into unconsciousness and often slip away in their sleep. Other diseases of old age, such as cancer, have taken over.

• Gonorrhea becomes hard to treat. Resistant strains are already on the rise. Without treatment, the sexually transmitted disease causes pelvic inflammatory disease, infertility and ectopic pregnancies.

• Tuberculosis becomes incurable – first we had TB, then multi-drug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) and now there is XDR-TB (extremely drug resistant TB). TB requires very long courses (six months or more) of antibiotics. The very human tendency to stop taking or forget to take the drugs has contributed to the spread of resistance.

We’ve brought this upon ourselves

While evolutionary processes have certainly contributed to the rise of AR strains, so too have poor medical practices, a deep-rooted sense of denial, and just plain negligence.

“Irrational and inappropriate use of antimicrobials is by far the biggest driver of drug resistance,” claims the WHO. “This includes overuse, when drugs are dispensed too liberally, sometimes to ‘be on the safe side’, sometimes in response to patient demand, but often for doctors and pharmacists to make more money.” Doctors are also guilty of of underdosing, a practice which allows resistant bacteria to survive.

A recent report in the British Medical Journal by Richard Smith and Joanna Coast points out that the existing class of antibiotics may be the best we will ever have. There have been efforts to support interventions that encourage more conservative and appropriate use of antibiotics to halt or slow down the progress of AR bacteria, but the report’s authors say it’s too little, too late.

Smith and Coast contend that AR has fallen victim to evidence-based policy making, which “prioritizes health problems according to economic burden” and the “cost effectiveness of each intervention.” As a result, health economists have been unable to show that antibiotic resistance costs enough money to be a health priority.

But this ignorance may be changing. One study has shown that antibiotic-resistant infections cost the U.S. healthcare system in excess of $20 billion annually. It also results in more than $35 billion in societal costs and more than eight million additional days spent at the hospital.

There’s also the use of antibiotics in livestock to consider. These drugs are not used to heal animals, but rather to make them grow faster and suppress diseases. In many parts of the world, more than 50% in tonnage of all antimicrobial production is used in food-producing animals. Two years ago, 30 million pounds of antibiotics were used for livestock — that’s 80% of all sales. And it’s a number that’s still growing.

According to David Kessler, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration from 1990 to 1997, the FDA monitors antibiotics used to treat livestock animals — but they know virtually nothing about them. This means we only a vague idea of how 80% of our antibiotics are being used.

“We need to know more about the use of antibiotics in the production of our meat and poultry,” says Kessler. “The results could be a matter of life and death.”

He continues:

We have more than enough scientific evidence to justify curbing the rampant use of antibiotics for livestock, yet the food and drug industries are not only fighting proposed legislation to reduce these practices, they also oppose collecting the data. Unfortunately, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, as well as the F.D.A., is aiding and abetting them...

...Combating resistance requires monitoring both the prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in our food, as well as the use of antibiotics on livestock. In human medicine, hospitals increasingly track resistance rates and antibiotic prescription rates to understand how the use of these drugs affects resistance. We need to cover both sides of this equation in agriculture, too.

Other options

Despite the doom-and-gloom, there are still things we can do, both in terms of policy changes and in the development of new therapeutic techniques.

Governments can do their part by incentivizing and encouraging health workers, pharmacists, civil society, patients, and industry to do their part. Surveillance efforts can be expanded (including better oversight of livestock), along with improved use of medicines for humans and animals. Drug regulations and supply systems can be improved. We should also work to prevent and control infections to the best of our abilities (like improved hygiene practices).

And of course, we should also encourage the development of new medical countermeasures, such as new antibiotics, bacteria-fighting viruses, and vaccines.

Of these, the idea of producing more antibiotics is the least attractive. They’re prohibitively expensive to develop, and there are no more easy targets.

But the other two lines of inquiry are already showing promise.

Viruses, in particular, have long been touted as a solution to antibiotic resistance. Back in 1915, a group of viruses which infect and kill bacteria — called bacteriophages — were discovered. These phages were found in the former Soviet republic of Georgia and are still part of the medical practices there.

Now, as a brand new study published in PLOS has shown, a phage-encoded molecule can be used to kill a wide range of bacteria, including MRSA. The new drug, called Epimerox, targets weaknesses in bacteria that have been traditionally exploited by viruses. The drug can protect animals from fatal infection by Bacillus anthracis, the bacteria that causes anthrax.

And remarkably, Epimerox has shown a tremendous capacity for resistance in developing resistant bacteria.

"We're taking advantage of what phage have 'learned' during this period for us to identify new antibiotic targets that we believe will escape the problem of resistance found for other antibiotics," said lead researcher Vincent A. Fischetti, a professor and head of the Laboratory of Bacterial Pathogenesis and Immunology.

There’s also the potential for vaccines. Several years ago, U.K. chief medical officer Liam Donaldson predicted that vaccines for for MRSA and C. difficile should be ready within a decade.

Indeed, work on vaccines has begun. Immunologist Robert Daum has devised an unorthodox strategy in which T cells are stimulated — a part of the immune system that’s not typically considered. The idea is to base a vaccine on stimulating Th-17 lymphocytes and production of interleukin-17. They’re still several years away from even a Phase I formula, but it could herald the first generation of anti-bacterial vaccines.

Whether or not this is the right approach still needs to be seen. But it’s certainly the right attitude. Yes, the post-antibiotic era is nearly upon us, but as always, we’ll continue to fight and find new ways to combat the most efficient and prolific organism this planet has ever seen.

Additional reporting by Joseph Bennington-Castro.

Other sources not cited: BBC, World Health Organization, New York Times, CDC, Guardian,

Images: Top: Knorre/Shutterstock; CBS News (turkeys); ktsdesign/Shutterstock (bacteriophage).

I suspect it had something to do with the conditions. I was tearing apart an old patio when it happened, and I was covered in dirt and bits of decaying railway ties. My suspicion is that the bee didn't cause the infection, but opened a wound to allow the microbes in. Or, it could have been an allergic reaction, though I don't react badly to bee stings.

Researchers from Germany say that red wood ants change their behavior markedly just before an earthquake hits — a possible indication they can feel it coming.

This is not the first time the predictive powers of ants have been observed. Prior to rainstorms, they’ve been seen to extend the height of their mounds, or even sprout wings and fly away. The newest evidence, about ants predicting earthquakes, was presented by Gabriele Berberich at the European Geosciences Union’s annual meeting in Vienna.

Berberich, who works at the University Duisburg-Essen, studied the behavior of over 15,000 individual red wood ants living alongside a German fault line. Over the course of three years, her team meticulously catalogued their behavior using video cameras and special software.

It was over the course of this time that 10 earthquakes struck the region, ranging in magnitude from 2.0 to 3.2, including many small tremors. The ants disregarded anything below a 2.0 quake, which is also the smallest quake that humans can feel.

Normally, ants are diurnal like humans; they’re up and active during the day, and they rest inside the mound at night.

But before an earthquake hits, the ants get restless and they leave the mound — even at night. It’s risky behavior because they're highly vulnerable to night predators. The researchers also observed that normal ant behavior didn’t return until at least a day after the earthquake.

Berberich theorizes that the ants are picking up on changing gas emissions or local shifts in the Earth’s magnetic fields. She says they have chemoreceptors for carbon dioxide gradients and magnetoreceptors for electromagnetic fields that enable them do this.

Source: Our Amazing Planet.

Image: Gabriele Berberich.