28th May 2011 It's those fungi to the rescue again: MS drug

Today I read about how a fungus, Isaria sinclairii, (pictures) has given rise to a new oral drug, Fingolimod for multiple sclerosis.

Isaria sinclairii is an entomopathogenic fungus which means it is an insect parasite which kills the host insect. It lands on an insect, grows through its outer skin and then takes up residence inside where it continues to grow, completely destroying the insect. It then produces little stalks with a white mass, called conidia,  a type of spores, at the top. (Pictures of this and other entomopathogenic fungi including the insect corpses).

Fingolimod is an immunosuppressive drug approved, in 2010 and 2011, for use in USA, Russia, Europe, Australia and Canada. It can slow the progression of disability and reduce the frequency and severity of symptoms in MS. [3, 6] Details of trials, both completed and continuing, side effects and how the drug works can be found at Multiple Sclerosis Trust: Fingolimod.

1. Science Based Medicine: Fungus Yields New Prescription Drug for Multiple Sclerosis
2. Wikipedia: Fingolimod
3. FDA press release
4. Wikipedia: Entomopathogenic fungus
5. Wikipedia: Conidium
6. Multiple Sclerosis Trust: Fingolimod

26th May 2011 Coral and Day Length

Coral lays down a layer of calcium carbonate every day. These layers can be counted, and so a thicker layer of 365 of them represent a year. Without knowing the length of a year, could we tell it's 365 days? Yes. The thickness of the layers varies with the seasonal variation in day length so there is a cyclic pattern to the layers. [2]

What about coral fossils? What do they tell us? Looking at fossils from 400 million years ago, there are about 410 layers per year. [1] What does this mean? Since the time it takes Earth to orbit the Sun is constant, it means that the length of a day was shorter, about 21 hours long [1,2]. Hence the earth is now spinning more slowly than it was 400 million years ago. Extrapolating back to 4.5 billion years ago, when a massive collision caused the formation of the moon [3], each day would only last about 6 hours.[1]

1. http://www.channel4.com/programmes/catastrophe/episode-guide/series-1/episode-1 16:00-19:30 minutes
2. http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/coral-clocks.txt
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon#Formation

22nd May 2011 Bioluminescence

I've been running across quite a few things about bioluminescence recently. In the video below, Edith Widder who has spent her academic life studying this, explains some theories as to why so many creatures in our oceans produce light. There's even a whole blog dedicated to glowing stuff with a wonderful collection from nature, art, the human body.

16th May 2011 The Great Vowel Shift

A week or so ago, a friend mentioned to me about the Great Vowel Shift which is when a lot of the vowel sounds changed in English. My immediate reaction was, "How do we know? We can't hear what they sounded like. Was it just a spelling reform or an actual pronunciation change?" There was nothing for it but to wait until I could ask Google for some answers, although I did find a reference in a book on the English language [7] which led me to a more successful search term.

What is the Great Vowel Shift?

The Great Vowel Shift is the name given to the change in long vowels from Middle English to Modern English which occurred from about 1450 to 1750. The long vowels changed as the position of the tongue when pronouncing them moved to different, higher place in the mouth. Others became diphthongs which are vowels which are pronounced by moving the mouth so two vowel sounds are combined in one syllable.

It occurred in the south of England around London and gradually spread, and is still spreading today as local dialects become gradually changed and a more 'standard' version of English spoken.

Before the shift, vowels were similar to continental vowel sounds. Today, they remain in dialects in the north of England and Scotland. An example of this is the monophthong pronunciation of the word house in Scottish dialects as something like hoose[1,7]. A monophthong, the opposite to diphthong, and is a pure vowel sound, without movement of the mouth for the duration of the vowel.
An applet at The Great Vowel Shift - See and Hear the GVS gives an audio demonstration of how the vowels changed.

Examples of Vowel Changes

Consider the words mite, meet, meat and mate.

Word	Middle English Pronunciation
mite	similar to today's meet; like 'mit' but with a lengthened i.
mate	like mat but with a lengthened a.

Some people would pronounce meet and meat with the same vowel sound, others would pronounce meat and mite alike. Some would pronounce all three differently.

How do we know about it?

Of course we know about it because scholars of the day wrote about it. In particular, an othoepist John Hart [11] wrote about the pronunciation of English. An analysis of his work by Otto Jespersen was published in 1907, [2]. Another person who wrote about English spelling and pronunciation was the English mathematician, John Wallis.  He believed that you could not describe English in English and thus wrote his book, Grammatica linguae Anglicanae, in Latin, [8, 9, 10].

What are the consequences?

The Great Vowel Shift changed the pronunciation in the South of England, but left the rest of the country from the north of the Rivers Humber and Ribble retaining some of the old pronunciation which has led to a north-south division of accents.

Furthermore, at the beginning of the Great Vowel Shift, the printing press was invented. This gave greater accessibility to the written word.  A consequence of this was that spellings started to become commonly used and thus were retained. Spellings that made sense before the shift, that is, in Middle English, no longer made sense with the new pronunciation.

Thank you Great Vowel Shift and printing press for making spelling even more difficult than it would have been otherwise!

1.  BBC, h2g2, The Great Vowel Shift
2.  John Hart's pronunciation of English (1569-1570) - Otto Jespersen  full text available in various formats
3. Wikipedia: diphthongs
4. Wikipedia: monophthong
5. Wikipedia: Great Vowel Shift
6. The Great Vowel Shift - See and Hear the GVS
7. D. Graddol, D. Leith, J. Swann, English: history, diversity and change 1996, The Open University, London.  p152.
8. Tim William Machan, English in the Middle Ages, OUP
9. Wikipedia: John Wallis
10. everything2: Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae
11. Wikipedia: John Hart

17th May 2011 Sitting

I ran across this rather nice visual summary of the information I wrote about about a month ago. (Click image for larger version.)


Via: Medical Billing And Coding

13th May 2011 Art Galleries

I've never really been a fan of art, but I can imagine spending hours on  Google Art Project.  There are pictures to peruse in enormous detail from 17 art galleries in 9 different countries.

Earlier today I heard something saying that to really appreciate a picture you should spend 3 hours looking at it.  The detail in this makes it seem like a reality to do that. I think the experience of seeing the picture in real life would be enhanced by being able to spend time exploring it before hand.

6th May 2011 Pollination

I've been thinking about writing about pollination for a while now, since there are so many different creatures employed by plants in spreading their pollen from one to another. This TED video shows the true beauty of some of them: butterflies, bees, bats, humming birds.

6th May 2011 Simple Toys to Make with Junk

I think I'm going to have to get making some of these. They look like fun!

5th May 2011 Sparrow

Yesterday this cute little fellow was sitting on the fence in our garden waiting to be fed by its parent.