Photograph courtesy of EuroMagic via Creative Commons

My nephew is one of the 6 million children in the United States with food allergies. He has a severe nut allergy, requiring an epinephrine (adrenaline) injection and immediate trip to the emergency room after contact with someone whose touched or eaten nuts. His rapid onset of life-threatening symptoms includes swelling of the throat, difficulty breathing, and hives. He isn’t alone. The number of children with peanut allergies has tripled in the last decade. Every three minutes a food allergy reaction sends someone to the emergency room and every 6 minutes the reaction is one of life-threatening anaphylaxis.

Although children often out-grow their allergies to milk, egg, wheat and soy, this is occurring more slowly than in previous decades. Allergies to peanuts, tree nuts, fish or shellfish are generally lifelong allergies.

A food allergy reaction is a learned response, meaning that our bodies learn to overreact to particular food proteins. In this process, the IgE antibody, that is suppose to fight off infections, instead recognizes certain food proteins as abnormal invaders. The IgE antibody tells the body to release histamines and other chemicals that can cause a progressive and sometimes life-threatening reaction (see animated explanation).

Unfortunately there is no cure for food allergies. Unlike other allergies, there aren’t any proven treatments for food allergies either. The only solution has been to avoid the allergy-triggering food. In the case of accidental exposure, antihistamines are taken for mild reactions or epinephrine shots and a trip to the hospital are critical for more severe reactions.

However, promising food allergy therapies are now under study – recently moving from laboratory and animal testing into human clinical trials. The goal is to persuade patients’ immune systems that food allergens aren’t serious threats.

Early clinical trial results have shown promise for three experimental treatments:

• Oral Immunotherapy: Under close medical supervision, patients swallow tiny but increasingly larger amounts of the allergy-triggering food in order to build up immunity. It is being tested for peanut, egg and milk allergies.

• Sublingual Immunotherapy: Liquid containing allergy-triggering food proteins is placed under the tongue, where it is quickly absorbed into the bloodstream. It is being tested for a variety of food allergies.

• Food Allergy Herbal Formula-2 (FAHF-2): Patients take pills comprised of a nine-herb formula that is based on traditional Chinese medicine. This therapy alters the global immune response, rather than that of a single allergen, so it could treat patients allergic to multiple foods. It is being tested for peanut, tree nut, fish and shellfish allergies.

In addition, scientists are trying to understand how food allergies develop in order to help prevent them. For instance, recent studies indicate that early skin exposure to a food protein leads to allergic sensitization, but early oral exposure to a food allergen induces tolerance.

These new studies should give hope to the 15 million people in the United States with food allergies. In order to help educate people about food allergies, the fourteenth annual Food Allergy Awareness Week is May 13-19.

Sea nettles (Chrysaora quinquecirrha), a type of stinging jellyfish, are present in the waters of the Barnegat Bay and other coastal waterways of New Jersey.

A global explosion in jellyfish populations is raising alarm in the scientific community around the world. The proliferation has threatened to shut down power plants in Israel and has tripped up commercial fishing operations in Japan.

In Barnegat Bay, separated from the Atlantic Ocean by the Barrier Islands of the New Jersey shore, the consequences are a bit more mundane: swelling numbers of stinging sea nettles over the past decade has made swimming on some beaches impossible, and bayside homeowners are complaining that rentals are down.

Teams of researchers are mapping the DNA of the small, saucer-shaped sea nettles, and collecting water samples to track the conditions in which they do best. But they are also trying to answer a more basic question: how much populations are actually growing.

This summer, researchers with the Barnegat Bay Partnership began screening local beaches with a fifty-foot net four times a week to establish population numbers. In the largest haul, they captured (and threw back) an estimated 1,400 sea nettles in one sweep.

"It tells us that things have changed, that something's out of balance, something is out of whack," said Jim Vasslides, a scientist with the environmental group.

Vasslides said a handful of factors are likely contributing: rising water temperatures means jellyfish in their larveal stage are surviving and thriving over the winters. Changes in water salinity is also likely a factor, as is a lack of predators.

Nitrogen runoff in the densely populated northern areas of the watershed causes low dissolved oxygen levels in the bay and surrounding waterways, which kills off many types of fish but leave jellyfish thriving.

Researchers recently captured (and threw back) an estimated 1,400 sea nettles along the shore in one sweep of a 50-foot net.

Finally, an increase in man-made structures in the bay, including docks and bulkheads, gives jellyfish polyps an ideal place to attach, overwinter and multiply. Ironically, the jellyfish seem to do better on plastic surfaces that started replacing pressurized wood when concerns were raised about harmful chemicals leeching into the bay.

The sea nettles are not just an annoyance, but can alter the balance of the entire bay ecosystem, changing the dissolved oxygen content in the water and affecting microbial communities and more visible species, Vasslides said.

"They'll also eat a lot of the smaller prey…that are food for bigger fish, so they could really wipe out some of these smaller fish populations,” Vasslides said.

Vasslides said the group hopes to expand its monitoring efforts to additional beaches next summer.

Visit WHYY's Newsworks for further coverage on how the proliferation of sea nettles are affecting locals.

Quest Educational Resources

 Print Guide - Farallon Islands

 Farallon Islands KML File

 Tips to get the kids in your life out into nature

 Designing an Exploration on Google Maps

Additional Links

• Farallones Marine Sanctuary Association

Who's more energy efficient with the dishes– you or your dishwasher? Image: Ronan_tlv

Now as a regular morning coffee drinker who uses a kettle and a gas stove to heat water for coffee (not instant– yuk! I use a coffee filter cone and PEET's coffee, of course) instead of the microwave, since our microwave is an old piece of inefficient junk that takes forever to heat water, I thought that buying a new microwave would make me a more energy efficient coffee drinker. But I was wrong!

Jennifer Mitchell-Jackson, while a graduate student at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, measured the energy use of an average microwave oven, an electric stovetop, and a gas stovetop to heat up a mug of water. Turns out that an electric stove uses 25% less electricity than an average microwave oven to heat a mug of water. A gas stove is less efficient and uses more energy than a microwave oven, but depending on the cost of gas, it might cost less to heat a mug of coffee with gas compared to the microwave.

It is more efficient to wash dishes by hand than it is to use a dishwasher. True or false?

How many arguments has that one caused! The research to dispel this myth came from Germany. Rainer Stamminger, a professor of household and appliance technology and his colleagues at the University of Bonn, gathered more than 100 volunteer dishwashers with varying skill levels and dishwashing styles in a laboratory, and measured the amount of water and energy each used to wash big stacks of dirty dishes. He then washed similar dirty dishes in dishwashers and measured the dishwashers’ water and energy use.

His conclusion: The machine is more efficient than the hand. In general, the dishwashers used much more water and somewhat more energy than the dishwashing machines. Some test subjects used 53 gallons of water to clean 12 place settings! But there is a wide variation in the styles and economics of hand dishwashing.

Clearly, a new, efficient dishwasher is best. But if you can’t afford one, or like to spend a lot of time with your hands in soapy water, Stamminger and company have some suggestions:

• Remove large dish scraps with a fork or spoon.
• Do the dishes soon after a meal before the food has dried on the plates (get your dinner guests involved).
• Do not pre-rinse your dishes under running tap water (same goes for dishwasher use).
• Use a hot-water sink for washing and a cold-water sink for rinsing.
• Use just the amount of detergent recommended by the manufacturer.

And put that coffee mug in the dishwasher when you're done.

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What does the size of a scorpion's claw mean?
Credit: kevinzim on flickr.com

The exhibits you see on the museum floor of the California Academy of Sciences are just the tip of the iceberg of the Academy's work. In fact, 90% of what we do is the education and research that happens behind-the-scenes. It is this ongoing research that in turn generates the exhibits and programming that guests enjoy.

The Naturalist Center, located on the 3rd floor, is a direct link for visitors to the education, research, and resources of the vast research collection that lies behind-the-scenes of the museum. Guests can ask questions at the Naturalist Center and they will get a reply from an Academy researcher or educator versed in that subject.

Below are some interesting questions guests have posed recently and the responses from experts on staff.

Q: How many copies of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" were published initially?
A: The first edition and printing had a print run of 1250 copies. All the copies sold on the first day of sale according to "The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin".

Q: You have a specimen in your collections that is noted for being the most poisonous bird in the world. Do you have more information on it?
A: It is the Hooded Pitohui (Pitohui dichrous). An Academy researcher, Jack Dumbacher, experienced the toxicity of these birds first-hand when he was doing research in Papua New Guinea and decided to study them more. He found that they sequester poisons from something they feed on, much like poison dart frogs.

Q: Do owls really see in total darkness like your matching game says?
A: Renowned for their solemn, spooky mien, owls have large eyes that face forward, and arrangement that's rare even among predatory birds. This gives them binocular vision and the resultant depth perception necessary to judge distances with almost pinpoint accuracy. These fast-focusing eyes are also equipped with a mirror-like membrane that lets them sample extremely dim light twice, and a dense concentration of light-sensitive cells in the retina. While owls may not be able to see everything in total darkness, they can see what other nocturnal predators might miss.

Q: What is Arsenic and Strychnine made out of?
A: Arsenopyrite is an iron arsenic sulfide (FeAsS). Strychnine is an alkaloid extract obtained from the dried ripe seeds of Strychnos nux vomica, a small tree of the East Indies.

Q: Someone told me that the red-winged blackbirds only have that red flash in mating season – is that correct?
A: According to Western Birds, QL 683 .W4 P4 1990, these epaulets are 'most conspicuous' in the spring time, suggesting that they are there all year round but brighter in the mating season.

Q: Do you know that saying about claw and tail sizes of scorpions that tells you which ones are more poisonous than the other?
A: The simple, although not universal, rule is that scorpions with thin pedipalps (claws) and thick tails tend to be more venomous than those with stout pedipalps and thinner tails. Working through this in a logical way, we can think that a scorpion with a large claw may be able to subdue its prey with the claw. If it has thin claws, it may need to rely more on the venom from the stinger to make up for its lack of strong claws. For more information about scorpions, click here. There is also a very well written amateur information page here.

Academy visitors can also ask questions about Academy exhibits or natural history. One day, when I was working in the Naturalist Center, a woman asked if squirrels eat bark and if so are they particularly fond of citrus bark? With a bit of research, we found out that some California-native squirrels indeed do eat bark and are fond of citrus trees. Below are some of the questions asked recently in the naturalist center, their corresponding answers as well as links to relevant fact sheets.

Q: Why is the green iguana orange? What do you feed it? (Visitor)

A: According to an Academy aquarium biologists, when males reach sexual maturity their coloring will turn orange. It's more hormonal than dietary, however diet can slightly influence color. The Academy has a male that is roughly three years old. He was rescued from a flea market as a baby in very poor condition. He is fed primarily greens (dandelion, collard, arugula) and small amounts of green beans, sweet potato, yellow squash, mango, berries, banana, papaya, cactus, and flowers along with a vitamin/calcium supplement.

Q: What is a hyrax?

A: A hyrax is related to the manatee and dugong and is the closest living relative of the elephant. More information is given on hyraxes in this fact sheet: www.awf.org/content/wildlife/detail/hyrax

Q: What is the wattage of the lights that are above the rainforest dome?

A: The electrician in the Academy noted that they are 1000 and 2000 watt bulbs.

Q: How much does the roof weigh?

A: It weighs between 2.7 and 2.8 million pounds not including the steel and concrete. More specific information is given on the Living Roof Fact Sheet: http://www.calacademy.org/newsroom/releases/2007/living_roof_fact_sheet.php

Q: How many African Penguins are in an average colony?

A: The number varies greatly and there is no true average. There are colonies with as few as 240 breeding pairs and one that was as high as 55,000 at one time. African penguin numbers have declined worldwide at an alarming rate in recent years. Decline in numbers is due to threats that range from oil spills to feral cats. Food availability and prime breeding territory are major factors in colony size as well. Today, there are an estimated 50,000 total breeding pairs worldwide. More information is given on African penguins in this fact sheet: http://combine.cs.bris.ac.uk/opencms/opencms/Richards_Homepage/My_Research/AfricanPenguin.html

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Though it was McCarthy who persuaded his nine other colleagues at the conference to adopt the term "artificial intelligence" to describe the nascent field, the seeds of artificial intelligence were planted earlier. Alan Turing, who was instrumental in breaking the German's Enigma code during WWII, published a paper in 1950 that laid out what came to be known as the "Turing Test:" if a machine could carry out a conversation with a human in such a sophisticated manner as to trick the human into thinking that he or she was conversing with another human, then the machine would have displayed true "intelligence."

But nearly 60 years later, the world still awaits a machine capable of exhibiting "general A.I.", instead of the "narrow A.I." demonstrated by IBM's chess-playing Deep Blue or Stanford University's Stanley, an autonomous robotic vehicle, or other impressive albeit limited applications of A.I. For example, Deep Blue may be able to beat Gary Kasparov at chess but can it beat a 10 year-old at a game of checkers? The lack of a general A.I. is made even more stark when juxtaposed with Moore's Law, a maxim that goes back to 1965 when Intel founder Gordon Moore postulated that the number of transistors on a computer chip would double roughly every 18 months.

There's even a term – "Singularity" – that is being used to describe the moment when technological progress will leapfrog and herald the creation of computers that not only achieve human-like intelligence, but also give rise to a progeny of computers who will be smarter then their digital forbears. Though he didn't coin the term (sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge did), the most famous exponent of this belief is inventor Ray Kurzweil. He places the Singularity as occurring sometime before 2050 and believes that with the advent of this unheralded technological progress, mankind may solve some of our society's most pressing ills, such as global warming, and even conquer death, by uploading one's consciousness into a virtual medium.

Though this seems a far stretch from engineering a domestic robot like Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Robot, top A.I. researchers like Stanford's Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller do believe that computing systems will some day be as smart or smarter than humans. When I spoke with Dharmendra Modha about his work into cognitive computing at IBM, he talked effusively about creating an "i-Brain," a digital accessory that people could carry around, making decisions and processing information like its human cousin. But if you're like me, and lament those moments when you've misplaced your keys or other instances of poor neural performance, you can't help but think that such a device can't arrive soon enough. On second thought, I'll wait until v2.0 hits the shelves.

Watch the Artificial Intelligence: Thinking Big television story report online.

And don't miss our Web Extra: A Dose of A.I. In this QUEST web exclusive, Stanford University computer science professor and artificial intelligence (A.I.) researcher Daphne Koller provides an elegant explanation of how A.I. can be employed in the examining room to diagnose a patient's illness more accurately than a human clinician. Find out more and learn how medical diagnosis is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to tasks that rely on making sense of a sea of data to arrive at an informed conclusion.

I had the pleasure of briefly meeting Dr. Robert Drewes, the esteemed Curator and Chairman of the Department of Herpetology at the California Academy of Sciences, upon his return from the Gulf of Guinea where he has been leading research teams over the past decade to study the unique flora and fauna of the islands.

He was still tired from his travels, but his exuberant personality and lively sense of humor were still intact despite his jet-lag. He supplied me a DVD of photos that illustrated his adventurous exploits over the years – such as grappling a giant python snake and mucking about in swamps at night in search of specimens – and proof that he certainly had a lot of fun in the field throughout the course of his long and productive career.

Learn more about Dr. Drewes and his passion for Africa and frogs in the "Why I Do Science" profile, and be sure to check out our story "Disappearing Frogs" about Bay Area researchers investigating the decline of frog populations.

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