Your floor-model animal mitochondrion. Public domain. Click for link. Two billion years ago, around the time atmospheric oxygen levels were rising, one cell engulfed another, and instead of becoming lunch, the ingestee became an Earth-changer and, eventually, a vital part of you: mitochondria. These microscopic cell inhabitants/engines allowed their host cell to suddenly begin to burn oxygen when digesting their food, an energy source that vastly expanded the amount of energy they could harvest from a given morsel of food. The magic born of this union helped enable nearly all multicellular life on Earth to evolve and get big, complicated, and, in our case, hairy and prone to back problems. Most multicellular organisms would agree it was a good move. However, there have long been ... Continue reading →

In the Nature podcast interview that went along with my Kawasaki Disease story at Nature (look for the interview halfway down the page at the story here), I talked about the tantalizing work of Dr. Anne Rowley at the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine. She has studied the tissues of Kawasaki Disease patients and believes she has found virus-like particles in their respiratory tissues (hold tight for exciting photos at the bottom of this post). But in describing her research during the interview, I misspoke slightly (forgive me Anne! I was nervous!). Before I correct what I said, a little bit more about her work. While reporting the KD story, I learned that Rowley was on the trail of a possible virus responsible for Kawasaki ... Continue reading →

Aneurysms in the coronary arteries of a Kawasaki victim. Public domain; click for source. That’s the question I examine in my first feature story for Nature, published today online and in the print magazine April 5. A bizarre disease of toddlers and infants called Kawasaki Disease — which only emerged in the 1960s in Japan — causes little kids to develop rash; fever; swollen hands, feet, and lymph nodes; red tongue and cracked lips; and, bizarrely, to develop coronary artery aneurysms that can kill them right away or years later by heart attacks in otherwise totally healthy young adults. Here’s a story that didn’t make it into the final cut of the article that describes one such case: In one case, a 42-year-old white triathelete ... Continue reading →

Seasonal winds from central Asia could be bringing Kawasaki disease into Japan. C. KOBER/ROBERT HARDING/CORBIS The desperately ill baby had been airlifted in from Wyoming, recalls Jane Burns, thinking back to 1981 and her third year as a paediatric resident at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver. Twenty-one days later, the little girl's skin rashes were mostly gone, but the accompanying fever was still raging, and Burns had no idea why. “I think this is Kawasaki disease,” said Richard Anderson, an infectious-disease fellow at the school, who had also examined the tiny patient. Burns was stunned. Kawasaki disease was uncommon even in Japan, where it had been first identified in the early 1960s, and was almost unheard of in the United States. ... Continue reading →

Marburg Virus. Note distinctive "Shepherd's crooks". CDC/ Dr. Erskine Palmer, Russell Regnery, Ph.D., CDC Public Health Image Library #275; Public Domain. Click for link. Back in 1994, Richard Preston scared the bejeesus out of everyone with his eye-opening non-fiction thriller “The Hot Zone”. It was a gripping read, and teenage me couldn’t put it down. In it, Preston documented the depredations of filoviruses — a family of wildly contagious filamentous RNA viruses that cause horrible, gory, swift deaths by multiple organ failure. You may be bleeding from any number of orifices when this happens. Death rates for the two classic filoviruses — Marburg Virus and Ebola Virus — hover between 30 and 90%, and for Ebola, consistently hit the higher end of that range. In ... Continue reading →

To ease on in to the weekend, let’s celebrate by watching some short films on a topic that I mentioned earlier this week in my planthopper post: plant bug poo, aka honeydew. It’s not as gross as you might think. Plant bugs feed on plant sap, which is seriously low in protein. In order to get enough, they have to drink/filter a LOT. As a result, they end up excreting a lot of what is essentially unwanted sugar solution. And lots of other things are interested in eating the leftovers. Before you implement your gag reflex, remember that North Americans eat something similar (albeit not passed through a bug’s nether regions) when we eat maple syrup, which is boiled, condensed maple sap. Now, lots of ... Continue reading →