Magnolias from other Worlds

Magnolia flowers, Ames, IA (May 4, 2014)

More than two weeks without blogging, that's the longest stretch since I restarted this blog almost one year ago. Sometimes life gets in the way: I had to give a presentation at a meeting in Baltimore (that was last week) and it took me two weeks non-stop work to prepare the talk. Before I left Ames it was still winter, the weird out-of-season Iowan version where it is warm one day and freezing the next. Now that I am back, spring finally arrived in full force. The magnolia in front of my house is peaking, and this post is a perfect excuse to show some of the flowers that survived last week rains.

Magnolia core

The trip, and the non-stop maddening work, were worth it though: this was one of the most interesting meetings I have ever attended. The meeting was about habitable worlds across time and space and the participants were equally divided among astronomers, geologists, climate scientists and biologists. Our task was to discuss what we really know about habitable planets outside Earth, and what we need to understand to search for more planets that could host living organisms right now. The fact is, this is not an easy task. Just defining what is alive and what is inanimate matter is not a trivial effort (the best definition I heard is that "it is alive if it can die"). If I look at the magnolia flower on the left, I instinctively know it is alive. But life comes in different forms, and recognizing it may be not so easy. One speaker talked about her expeditions in Antarctica to study a brine subglacial lake that has been isolated from the surface for millions of years. You would expect that whatever was trapped into the lake when the continent froze would have died by now. Not so fast: she found lots of little bugs thriving in the salty frozen water tens of meters below the surface. Well, thriving is maybe too strong a word: to survive in such a resource deprived environment the little buggers had to slow their metabolism to a death-defying point. Each of this bacteria, on average, reproduce only once every 120 years! Slow bloomers, they are.

Magnolia petals

Earth is completely shaped by life. Even the air we breathe was made by life. Oxygen is too reactive to survive as a free gas in a planetary atmosphere: a planet left to its own devices would rapidly lose all its oxygen as everything will rapidly rust, and Earth would become as red as Mars. The original atmosphere of our planet was rich in CO2, with no O2 whatsoever. Then the bugs arrived, the first wave of them, the cyanobacteria that figured out how to use sunlight to eat CO2 and breath out oxygen. They were tireless; they produced so much oxygen that they completely inverted the ratio between CO2 and O2. This was the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE) without which we would be very small and blue (you need an oxygen metabolism to sustain complex life). But bacteria didn't stop at the GOE, they changed not just the air we breathe, but also the rocks we walk. There are 5,000 minerals on this world, and 2/3 of them would not be here if it wasn't for the presence of bacteria. Some of these minerals are the actual shells of little bugs that died and formed immense carbon-rich layers at the bottom of the oceans. Most other minerals would not have ever formed in absence of an oxygen-rich atmosphere. We literally walk and breath on a planet shaped by life.

So where does this leave us if we want to search for life on other worlds? We can precisely count on the power of life to change its own environment. We can look for the signatures of life that distinguish a world from its dead counterpart, a living breathing oxygen rich atmosphere from a dead CO2 one. A world with rocks born out of living organisms instead of dead volcanic stones. We may not find an alien magnolia in the world next door, but sooner or later we will see the incontrovertible chemical signs that there are other worlds in the stable disequilibrium that would not be possible without the wondrous action of living matter. Other Gaias are out there, waiting to meet us across the aeons of time and space.

Magnolia flowers, Ames, IA (May 4, 2014)

The Long March of the Living Snow

Ames, Iowa (March 1, 2014)

For the last few months this blog has been roaming all around the world, with posts and stories inspired by mountaintops and valleys in four different continents. It is time to get back home; in the freezer, that is. Kero and I had our fun with the frigid winds and powdery snows but one would have thought that by now, April, winter would have let its grip go off the flat plains of Iowa. Not so, we still had a sprinkle of fresh snow on Friday morning. Not as much as in the photo above, but enough to cover with a layer of frost the dead flattened grass waiting for warmer times. It still go below freezing at night.

Snowflakes on my glove

This made me think about a story I heard on radiolab, about snow and the cleverness of life. It goes like this. Snow is made of ice crystals, like the ones in the photo on the left, borrowed from my instagrams. Ice in turn is made of water, cooled below its freezing point. The conversion of water into snow happens in the clouds which are made by floating tiny droplets of water vapor. You want to make snow? Simple, take some of this water flying in the sky, freeze it below 0ºC and voila, snow-on-demand. Well, nature is not so simple, after all. The tricky part is that, to make ice, water is not enough. You need a nucleation point around which the molecules of ice will start to self-organize in the ordered state of solid ice, from the disordered chaotic anarchy of liquid. Without a nucleation point, in fact, water can be cooled well below zero without freezing: supercooled water, like the one I mentioned a few posts ago in reference to cosmic inflation. Ice that won't freeze without a nucleating agent turns out to be a problem, however, if you want to form snow from the pure water in the clouds.

Many sorts of substances can work out as nucleating agents. The best one is ice itself: add a little crystal of ice to supercooled water or vapor, and the little H2O molecules will stop dancing in the wind, to stick just in the right place, growing the crystal like a beautifully sculptured snowflake puzzle. But what if you don't have ice to start with? Well, there are a number of chemicals that mimic the shape of ice crystals, and act as surrogate ice-nucleating points. One of them is a protein secreted by bacteria that like to live on grass. These bacteria are very common, and are found about everywhere in the world. One of their role is to help forming the frost that covers the grass in cold autumn nights, an ice-jacket that protects it from nocturnal below-freezing temperatures.

Bacteria are tiny bugs, however, and it doesn't take much to blow them away. In fact, bacteria likes to be blown away, to be carried by the wind in search of greener pastures. Some bacteria are so light that they can be blown all the way up to the sky: the jet stream is their preferred global transportation system. And that of course presents a problem: the sky is not very conducive to bacterial life, and at some point any good bacterium will need at some point to find a way back to the ground. Bacteria, however, do not have parachutes: how to get safely back to Earth from the heights of sky?

That's where the ice nucleating protein comes handy. Each bacteria in the sky, when the temperature is cold enough, will start nucleating ice around its shell, ultimately growing a large snowflake, heavy enough to precipitate to the ground, but light enough to slow down the fall. Think of this, next time its snowing: for each snowflake falling to the ground, there is a tiny bacterium finding its way home.

おかいりなさい, little bug.

Ames, Iowa (February 8, 2014)

1000 Miles

Ames, Iowa (October 27, 2013)

Gravity

+Rurousha  linked this article about the irish naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger, and his habit of random walking as a method to study the flora of Ireland. Walking is my favorite activity and an integral part of my photography. The description of Praeger attentive walks, where the focus is not on the destination, but on the walk itself, resembles the way I walk when I am in the "zone". My goal may be the scenic viewpoint at the end of the path, but most often than not the view waiting to be found is in the anonymous bend in the road. I never know in advance where my next photo is waiting for me. If I had not walked focused on the path, rather than the path's end, I would have missed it.

Fortunately for me, Kero also likes (demands) long everyday walks, one to two hours every day, no matter the weather or the temperature. He does slow down in Summer, as Samoyeds really don't like hot weather, but makes it up as soon as the thermometer turns downward. So we don't quite average the 1,000 miles per year recommended by the article, but we get quite close to that number. And even if we tend to go mostly in the same places (Ames is not that big) every day is different. The weather changes, the light transforms, life makes sure that every day there is something new to discover and bring back home.

Duotone

Ames, Iowa (October 19, 2013)

This is not really a duotone, just a background that is half sky and half dry autumnal grass bokeh. The flower (I don't know its name) blossoms late in the Summer, and then produces this fluffy white "fur" made to disperse its seeds in the strong Iowan winter months. It is purple when blossoming, but I almost like it more in the fall, so dignified with its silver crown of hairs.

November Weather

Ames, Iowa (October 19, 2013)

Weather finally catched-up with us: it was snowing this morning in Iowa. Not the January snow, the one that sticks hard to the ground and you can walk on it as if it is white marble. More like the November one, the slushy snow that becomes rain as soon as it touches a surface. Any surface, be the grass, or my hand. Or the snout of a dog too eager to go out for his morning walk, oblivious of the miserable weather. Loudly dragging me outside, when I would just have stayed tucked-in for the rest of the day.

The yellow daisies in the park have long lost their petals. Their dark heads are still standing up, proud, on their thin dry stalks. They will soon wear fashionable sparkling hats. How long until autumn's golds will turn into winter's whites? 

Ames, Iowa (October 19, 2013)

Where is my Summer?

Ames, IA (July 28, 2013)

Unicorn Golden Bee

My father was commenting today that the temperatures in Italy (he lives in a small village in the Alps) are now unusually low (15ºC = 60ºF last night), for being close to "Ferragosto" (15 of August), and that the summer must be ending. If that's the case then summer in Iowa is also a goner: our minimum temperature yesterday night was below 12ºC (54ºF). Is this unusual? Well, it is a little on the cold side but it is not unprecedented (record minimum cold temperature in August according to Wikipedia has been 4ºC = 40ºF) and I would not be surprised if we get more hot sweltering weather (35ºC at night with 80% humidity) before the end of the month. So, where is it global warming when you need it? Well that's about the climate, not the weather. What is steadily increasing is the global average, and to see that you need to average over a sufficient number of years. Blaming individual data points (the weather here and today) to climate change is a little tricky: local weather does what it wants. In fact one of the consequences of climate change is precisely to increase the local variability: put more energy in the system and it will move out of equilibrium, enhancing its oscillations around a slowly increasing average. So, don't trust somebody saying that global warming must have stopped because today is cold: that's not what climate change is responsible for. On a separate note, I can officially announce the discovery that unicorns exist! They are golden and they fly, indeed. 

Celestial Poo

Ames, IA (July 27, 2013)

Since we are talking about bugs, I found this interesting news in yesterday rss feeds. Catholics parishioners in Fresno, California, made it to the news when they claimed that a tree next to their church was crying. Now, weeping statues are quite common in catholic lore, but a crying tree seemed to me quite a novelty. According to the parishioners, the tree started crying when a parishioner asked for a miracle to cure her illness. Since then the tree is allegedly crying in sync with the worshipper's prayers. Now, where are the bugs in this story, you may ask? Well, it turns out that what is dropping from the tree are not exactly tears, but actual droppings, from aphids secreting a sugar-rich sticky liquid (honeydew) as they feed on the plant's sap. In the right season, when there are enough aphids, the amount of honeydew they secrete is massive enough that it can indeed resemble as if their tree is crying. Although some of the parishioners are well aware of the physical explanation for the phenomenon, they still believe it is a miracle, which they see in how the tree started "crying" exactly when a miracle was pleaded. I guess an entomologist's poo can as well be worshippers' tears!

This is not at all surprising. All myths find their origin in some natural phenomena. Myths are created as part of the human drive to explain the world, when the actual cause of phenomena is beyond our immediate understanding. Our brain is tuned to see patterns (especial faces), even when there is no pattern: better err on the safe side seeing a leopard where there are only shadows, than missing the predator and ending up as its lunch. So we tend to develop fantastic stories to explain the extraordinary facts of everyday life, building in the process the sacred and profane mythology that so much permeates all human cultures. There is actually nothing wrong with that: those myths are what make human cultures interesting, regardless to their very mundane origin. I still enjoy reading Garcia-Marquez "One hundred years of solitude" even though I know that his magic realism is nothing else than his grandmother tales. Myths are what give depths to the soul of human cultures. They enrich us. Provided, of course, that they don't get into the way in our decision making when, being a naturalistic explanation available, we need to get past our myths to be able to make informed decisions about our future.

More Bugs

Ames, IA (Aug 4, 2013)

Every time I step into my garden with the camera and macro lens I find some new kind of bug that I didn't notice before. Take the butterfly above, for example. I have no idea of her name (I mean the species) and in fact when I saw her from a distance it didn't look like much. But then close up it is quite interesting, almost as airy as a moth, but diurnal as any other butterfly visiting my flowers during the day. Flowers that are still suffering from the japanese invasion, btw (you can see some of the petals all munched up by the green monster that are raiding my garden).

Another bee

I also saw more bees. Felt actually. Yesterday, just before sunset, I was in the garden cleaning up the roses from the japanese beetles (that's what they seem to like most these days). Since they clump by the dozens on single flowers, I found that the best way to get rid of them is to grab the entire infested flowers in my hand, and then unceremoniously dispose of the whole thing. Well I learned that there is a reason why gardeners use gardener's gloves while doing this kind of things: one of the flower was hosting not just beetles but also a nice bee like the one in the photo of the left. Not a honey bee, again, but still a bee with sting and all. Of course she was not happy in finding herself in my closed hand, and she rapidly found a very effective way of persuading me to let her free. Fortunately she didn't left her sting implanted in my fingers. Fortunately for me as the pain didn't last more than 5 minutes, but also for her, since she would have died if her sting had gotten stuck in my finger. Still it wasn't entirely pleasant. Anyway, I guess I learned my lesson: look at your bugs before getting too close.

Monsters from Outer Space

Tentacled Alien Monster in Ames, IA (Aug 4, 2013)

The other night, when I was writing about the green monsters infestation in my garden, it came to my mind how common is our fascination with monsters. It is something that can be found in any culture, and at any time. It doesn't matter what we believe and what we know, there is always a corner of our mind where the shadow lurks, ready to conjure some supernatural being as an explanation to something we cannot explain otherwise. Many of these monsters have a base in reality, but become larger and more mysterious, magical, terrifying as their story gets repeated and recreated from mouth to ear to a new mouth. As strange and alien as they may seem, though, these monsters are nothing else than the projection of our minds. As such they retain the familiarity of our experience, fear, emotions. This familiarity makes them less alien, in the end. They are part of us.

I was thinking of this as I was watching the trailer of "The Europa Report", a science fiction movie that came out in the last few days. I still didn't see the movie, so don't worry, you won't find here any spoiler, just speculations. The movie tells the story of a mission to Europa, one of the four main moons of Jupiter. Europa is a world of ice and fire. It is close enough to Jupiter than its core is heated by tidal effects, but far enough that this internal heat is not sufficient to keep its surface above water's freezing temperature. The result is that Europa is covered by a thick crust of ice, under which it is believed to exist a vast ocean of liquid water, possibly rich of mineral and oxygen brought up by its underwater vulcanism powered by its tidal heat. The conditions on Europa may be, in fact, quite similar to the conditions that are found on Earth at the bottom of our oceans. These are conditions where life can exist, which is something that makes Europa the grand prize of planetary exploration, the best site where we can look for extraterrestrial life. Genuine alien monsters. Without having watched the movie, I don't know if the crew landing on that moon and penetrating the ice will find anything alive. I wish one day we could put together enough resources and technology to go and see for real. By judging at the resilience of life on every nook and cranny on Earth's surface, oceans and rocks, I am led to believe that the emergence of life is something as inevitable as sunset being followed by sunrise. But we really don't know, because we have only one example to refer to (Earth) and a statistics of one doesn't really count.

The question however remains: if we will find life outside our planet, will it be monsters ready to pounce on us, eat us, or use us as incubators for their larvae like the monsters in the Alien movie series? I seriously doubt that. The building blocks of all life on Earth are proteins, and proteins are made with smaller blocks called amino acids. All eukaryote cells (cells like the one in animals and plants) are mades with just 21 different amino acids. These 21 amino acids are however just a small portion of all possible known amino acids, In fact we know how to build about 500 different amino acids using the same basic arrangement of atoms of the 21 used by eukaryote life. Not only that, but each amino acid can exist in two symmetric forms (left- or right-handed): all eukaryote life uses the left-handed form of these 21 amino acids. This is not entirely surprising, as all life on Earth has evolved from a common ancestor, starting from the same building blocks. An effective ecosystem requires its members to be able to eat each other which has preserved the need of using the same set of chemicals through all different species. The end result is that life on Earth is remarkable homogeneous.

A bee in my garden!

This doesn't mean, however, that the same evolutionary solution must be found every time that life emerges. This is what worked and survived on Earth, with the specific challenges of Earth environment through the ages. Life on Europa, Mars on any other exoplanet of exomoon will likely find different challenges and different environments, so the evolutionary result may be quite different than our 21 left-handed amino acids. They may use any of the other 500 amino acids to make proteins. They may be right-handed. And if this is the case, I doubt that we will find monsters ready to devour us to satiate their infinite hunger for human flesh: our meat will likely be like poison for them, evolved to prey on different chemicals in a different ecological niche. That doesn't mean, of course, that the Europa Report movie, even if it manages to be scientifically correct (local aliens not really interested in eating us) will be a boring flick without monsters. Ghosts scare people to death even if they cannot touch them. Sharks sometime attack people even if human meat is not of a good taste for them: sharks usually bite people when they are provoked, or when they confuse swimmers for seals, and spit after biting (not that this is of much consolation for the person that is bitten). Alien monsters may provide the thrill for a successful sci-fi movie even if they cannot successfully eat us!

The alien-tentacled-monster above is just the stamen filaments of a flower in my garden: not very alien and not very monstrous. But monsters exists in our mind, so we can see them anywhere. Also, there is something else I found today in my garden: a bee! See photographic proof on the left. Not a run-of-the-mill western honey bee, but a bee nevertheless. There is still hope.

Jupiter, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto as photographed by my students last fall

This is Not a Bee

Ames, Iowa (Jul 27, 2013)

It is not the image of a bee either. It is some kind of bumblebee. The fact is, I have not seen a regular honeybee in my garden for years, now. They seem to have all but disappeared. In fact, they have.

The Colony Collapse Disorder is sending our friends the bees the same way of the dodo. It is not clear what is causing the disease, but it is capable to suddenly wipe out entire colonies (Pennsilvania lost 53% of its honeybee colonies in the 1995-96 season alone). This is an insect that is crucial for us: not just for the honey they produce, but because they are our main pollinator insect. For some species of flowering plants, the only pollinator. No bees, no fruit. It is estimated that bees pollination is responsible for more than $15 billion in increased crop value each year. And bees are disappearing at an alarming rate. While it is not entirely clear what is happening, recent research suggests that the culprit could be a class of pesticide, nicotinoids, that affect bees by lowering their immune response and affecting their homing abilities. These pesticides have been recently banned in some european states in an effort to try saving their colonies.

Monsters from Across the Pacific

Ames, Iowa (July 28, 2013)

I am not talking about a certain summer blockbuster movie where alien monsters surface from a portal at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The alien monsters I am referring to come from all the way from across the ocean. They didn't arrive through an interdimensional portal, but most likely hitched a ride on a regular boat. Their size is quite diminutive, but their shiny armor is impressive anyway. They are the only thing from Japan that I genuinely hate: Popillia Japonica, or the Japanese Beetle!

The beast is in fact quite small (15 mm max, the photo above is a macro enlargement), but the small size does not make it less of a threat. As the name suggest, it is native to Japan, where it is just another cute bug whose population is controlled by natural predators. Not so in the US, where those predators are absent, making the popillia japonica a terrible pest. Probably introduced with a shipment of irises before 1912 (before routine inspections of imported commodities began), it is gradually taking over the whole continent. Four years ago, when we arrived in Iowa, I remember noticing just a few of them. In the last two years their number has grown so much that my garden is repeatedly invaded by hordes that have completely annihilated my favorite daisy flower-bed, and decimated the remaining ones. The beast acts by skeletonizing the leaves of the victimized plant (you know, artistically eating all the green stuff leaving only the network of dead capillaries). Well, despite the colder than usual weather of this summer, my roses are already starting to be skeletonized. If this was not enough, even in the larva stage they are a menace, as they eat the roots of the grass, leaving large dead patches in the lawn. I really hate them.

As I mentioned before, in the US there isn't much in terms of natural predators capable of dealing with this calamity. Stink bugs and blue wings wasp kill Japanese Beetles, but there isn't enough of them around to stop the invasion, by the hundreds, that reach my garden every day. I don't want to spray pesticide near my tomatoes (or where our dog can play), so chemical warfare is not an option. Biological warfare has some limited effect (the larvae can be killed by fungal spore dispersed in the turf), but to work effectively it would need to be applied to the entire town (otherwise I would just be getting the beetles born in my neighbors lawn). Traps with pheromone baits attract more of them than they can catch. In the end, the most effective way of getting rid of this menace is to pluck the monsters one by one from the victimized plants, smash them in minute fragments and scatter their assorted body parts all around the infested area. Gross, yeah, but it seems to teach them the lesson: don't mess with my garden!

PS: no Japanese beetles were harmed to make the photo above. I actually took pity of the bug, and didn't have the heart to squash it after seeing it straight in its multi-faceted eyes. After taking the photo I just picked it up, and freed across the street.

The Princess that Loved Insects

Ames, Iowa (July 27, 2013)

One of my favorite authors is Hayao Miyazaki. I say author because his work go beyond animations. Miyazaki is a magician, capable of conjuring the fantastic worlds hidden inside us, that we lose growing up. Well, we never really lose them, they are just really well hidden, and a wizard like Miyazaki knows how to bring them back. When I am asked about my favorite Miyazaki movie I have a hard time to answer. Maybe Owl's Moving Castle, because of Sophie's strength. Or Spirited Away, because even putrid monsters deserve kindness. Or My Neighbor Totoro, of course, because I see him everywhere and I know I am never alone.

The truth, though, is that there will always be a special place in my heart for Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, the first movie by Miyazaki I had seen (whose manga I have read many times). Nausicaa is a princess who love insects, like the very unconventional lady in the XII century Heian tale. Nausicaa insects are enormous, the result of a human-made disaster that has rendered most of the world inhabitable and covered by a toxic jungle. Nausica knows in her heart (and by scientific experimentation) that the toxic plants are the agents of renovation in the world, and that the insects are the jungle caretakers. Together they are forces of creation, as opposed to humans that, even encroached by this environmental disaster, keep making things worse by pursuing war and destruction. Nausicaa is the one that restores the balance. 

What's not to like? When I was a little kid my parents brought me to a wedding that, as customary in Italy, consisted of a brief ceremony in the church, and an interminable lunch in some restaurant in the countryside. Naturally I got bored pretty soon and got permission to go outside to play in the restaurant garden. Earlier in the day I had noticed that people had been giving presents to the couple, and I was feeling a little sorry that I didn't have anything to give myself, so I decided to find something special for them. And something I found, and happily carried hidden in my hands, to the bride still sitting at the restaurant table. What I was not prepared to, though, was the weird reaction I got when I opened my hands: the bride had not screamed before, when receiving the presents from the other guests! Well, that's how I learned that not everybody likes bugs as much as I do, and beetles good wedding presents do not make. Who knew!

Grass

Moore Park, Ames, Iowa (Jun 14, 2013)

The big news of today is that SCOTUS has decided about the possibility of patenting human genes. The court opinion is quite interesting, and largely expected. Human genes cannot be patented, as they are a product of nature, while patents are admissible for genetic sequences created as part of diagnostic techniques. This means that companies like Myriad Genetics (that holds the patents related to the "breast cancer genes" BRCA1 and BRCA2) can still charge $3,000 for their test, but their monopoly is broken as researchers are allowed to develop new tests based on the same genes. These new tests will eventually make these genetic screening much more affordable. 

One weird thing about the sentence, though, is that while the Court voted unanimously, Judge Scalia refused to subscribe to the first part of the Court opinion. This is where the "textbook" basic principles of genetics are summarized (e.g. "what is a gene", "what is DNA", etc), and where is mentioned that "the study of genetics can lead to valuable medical breakthrough". Judge Scalia in his remarks wrote that he could not subscribe to the above sentences because "I am unable to affirm those details on my own knowledge or even my own belief". Judge Scalia does not believe in molecular biology? Or maybe he doesn't believe that the study of genetics is beneficial for society? Maybe he only wanted to point out that he didn't need to understand the scientific mumbo-jumbo in the court opinion to affirm the basic principle, that human genes cannot be patented. Ok then...

Today's photo has nothing to do with SCOTUS, or genetics. It is just some grass, found at Moore Park. The inset on the left is also grass, but flowering: did you know that prairie grass has little yellow flowers that hang down like little yellow lantern?