Science Made Cool

Friday Parasite #6: They Can Fly!

When I was a little kid, I had a case of pinworms. Naturally, I was mortified at the time – for one thing, I knew that if anyone in my class ever found out the teasing would probably last until the heat death of the universe. My mother blamed my fingernail-biting habit, claiming that I’d probably gotten them from playing with the neighbor’s cats. Now I know better.

Enterobius vermicularis is a nematode worm. It only lives inside human guts (and here's a movie from NEJM, if you have a strong stomach and want to see what it looks like), so the cats were innocent. They may have given me Toxoplasmosis, but never pinworms. In fact, the culprit was probably one of my Torquemada-like classmates. And I might not even have gotten it off their hands. Pinworm females lay their eggs around their host’s anus, but the eggs are sticky and get transferred to clothing easily. Once they're there, the eggs are so tiny that they can become airborne. If they’re floating, anyone can come along and inhale them. No wonder they’re so ubiquitous.


Photomicrograph of pinworm egg from
S.J. Upton, Kansas State University

Nostalgia for the Future

I've been having a very enjoyable time over the past week exploring this site:  Tales of Future Past.  It's a collection of images (and snarky comments) from obsolete visions of the future.  Most are from the 25-year span between the two New York World's Fairs.  Both fairs -- in 1939 and 1964 -- were full of nifty futuristic concepts.  The 1939 fair was the ultimate flowering of the Art Deco future of shiny aluminum skyscrapers with Zeppelin mooring masts, bulbous streamlined cars, and great big machinery.  The 1964 fair was the apex of New Frontier technical optimism based on plastics, big blinky-lights computers, and the power of the Atom.

The 1964 fair also represents an ending to the utopian idea of the Future as a place of abundance and ease.  Ever since about 1970 visions of the future have been pessimistic, if not absolutely apocalyptic.  The focus has been on overpopulation, pollution, shortages, oppression, and general unpleasantness. 

And yet the grimmer view of the future is just as implausible and quaint as its overly-optimistic predecessor.  Which brings me to the question I'd like to pose to readers:  what is the future of The Future?  What's our new "default version" of the Future, which will undoubtedly seem laughably naive in a couple of decades?

I suspect the ideas of Transhumanism are the best candidate for the next quaintly absurd future.  Like past visions of mechanized or atomic futures, it focuses on possibilities and tends to gloss over the hard details and the possible downsides.  Another, somewhat more grandiose quaintly absurd future are the ideas of really titanic engineering -- terraforming planets or remodeling stars.

Any other suggestions?

Dyn-o-mite!

This year's Nobel Prize in Medicine has been announced, and the winners are Andrew Z. Fire and local boy Craig C. Mello.  The news report didn't mention it, but I imagine drunken geneticists in Worcester and Stanford have already started trashing cars and throwing rocks at the police to celebrate.

The two men won the prize for their work in RNA interference, a technique for "turning off" genes in order to better study their effects and interactions. Congratulations to this year's winners.