Can you fool a baby panda?

Source: Reuters, via The Guardian

Workers at the panda conservation center in China's Wolong nature reserve dress up in panda suits when they have to handle panda cubs in their care. They claim that this is to minimize the human influences on the pandas, so that they won't be acclimatized to human presence before they are released to the wild.

How effective is this? Only time will tell. In the meanwhile, enjoy the bizarre photographs....

Creationism in Hong Kong schools?

Earlier in the year, a number of scientists in Hong Kong complained to the territory's Education Bureau about the new biology syllabus for schools, which included a clause stating that "in addition to Darwin's theory, students are encouraged to explore other explanations for evolution and the origins of life, to help illustrate the dynamic nature of scientific knowledge" (the latest version of the document on the bureau's website lacks this statement). Such wording has been used by advocates of creationism and Intelligent Design (ID) in the United States to legitimate the teaching of these so-called 'alternatives' to evolutionary theory in classrooms.

In May, a group of 62 people including education professionals replied to this criticism saying that there was no problem with the above wording and continued to impute that ID was a valid alternative to evolution. As a result, a group called the Concern Group for Hong Kong Science Education has set up an online petition calling on the Education Bureau to clarify its position on the teaching of evolution and to refute the claims of ID supporters in Hong Kong.

It's interesting how these hot-ticket issues have somehow become transplanted wholesale into a society which until lately has not seen such a polarized opposition between the secular and religious. Lacking the social and historical context (or baggage) of the ID debate in the US, the position of the pro-ID supporters in Hong Kong would seem very mild and entirely reasonable to an unsuspecting public. After all, what's wrong with teaching 'both sides' of the issue? To those who are aware of former creationist arguments against evolution, however, the sort of evidence and explanation used by the pro-ID camp seem uncannily familiar. They are not so much in favor of scientific even-handedness (suppose one wanted to teach 'both sides' of the Newtonian theory of gravitation...) but specifically wish to discredit evolution. As such it is quite disingenuous for the issue to be framed as merely giving voice to 'alternatives'.

As a social phenomenon, I'm quite curious to see how this plays out. Why is it that the ID or creationist movement has only started gaining prominence beyond the US around this decade? Reports have surfaced in the news about similar problems plaguing science educators in the UK and other European countries. In Turkey, the creationist movement is largely driven by one man, who goes by the pen name Harun Yahya, who although framing his opposition to evolution from an Islamic perspective, simply reuses the arguments of the Christian anti-evolutionists. So, future intellectual historians of our times: why is this happening now? And why simultaneously in societies so different from each other and from the US, where all this started?

Are heart cells and mammal eggs regenerated?

Two of the dogmas that most biology students learn in school are that cardiac muscle is not renewed, and that women (and almost all female mammals) are born with their full complement of eggs - they can't make new ones. Two recent studies have shown that these dogmas may not be as clear cut as they originally seem to be.

The first of these studies (New York Times article) was carried out by a team at the Karolinska Instituet in Sweden. They wanted to see if any of the cardiac muscle cells in humans were formed after the person's birth. In biology, the classic method to do such a tracing experiment in animals is to feed the animals some sort of radioactive tracer, which would then become incorporated into the DNA of cells that are being formed during the period that the the radioactive tracer was being fed to the individual. Cells formed after that period would not have radioactive tracer in their DNA. Obviously there are ethical implications of feeding humans radioactive tracers, but the experiment has already been done on unwitting subjects at a global scale.

During the 1950s, Cold War powers tested nuclear bombs above ground, releasing significant and measurable quantities of carbon 14 into the atmosphere. Individuals born during that time would have incorporated this carbon 14 signal into their tissue. After the test ban treaty in 1963, carbon 14 levels gradually diminished, and this changed isotope ratio can be detected in DNA synthesized after that date. The team applied their method to heart muscle cells, and found that for individuals born before the test ban, some of their heart muscle cells had a lower carbon 14 isotope ratio, meaning that those cells were produced after that date - evidence for regeneration.

The second study was carried out at the Shanghai Jiaotong University, and involved mice and not humans (NY Times article, Science feature). They also used a really cool technique, but one which operates on a less grandiose scale. Before this study, the debate in the field was whether supposed female germline stem cells (FGSCs) in mouse ovaries thought to be responsible for generating new oöcytes were in fact capable of doing so. The method used to isolate the FGSCs is called immunomagnetic isolation. Antibodies to a protein found only on FGSC surfaces were raised, and coated onto magnetic particles. Therefore, a magnetic filter would be able to isolate the supposed FGSCs. After isolation, they were transformed with green fluorescent protein, and introduced into the ovaries of sterile mice. The sterile mice were then mated with normal males, and offspring, expressing green fluorescent protein, were produced. This demonstrates that ovaries possess stem cells that are capable of regenerating oöcytes. Given the similarity of mouse and human reproduction, it is possible that humans have similar capabilities.

In both cases, therapeutic applications are a long way off, but it is still intellectually exciting to be aware that what has long been "known" as fact is still open to reassessment by pure empirical work, showing that biology is still a young and growing field.

Danwei: Rare South China tiger photo a hoax?

A peasant from Shaanxi claims to have taken a photo of the South China Tiger (Panthera tigris amoyensis), thought to be extinct in the wild. [See "Fake tiger, real news?" By Jeremy Goldkorn. Danwei, 19 Oct 2007



Photo from Danwei.

Netizens believed that this photo was PS-ed (photoshoped) and the controversy is generating even more news. This is partly related to fake news scandals (like the fake bun story) that struck China in recent months, courtesy of state-owned news agency Xinhua.

A healthy dose of skepticism is always a good thing!

Update: 1. now a Chinese botantist wades in with evidence from the size of the leaves in the tiger photo.
2. China Daily editorial

Update 3: Eye of the Tiger

Update 4: and the saga continues, now the tiger story even made it to Science magazine.

China's ecological disasters

TV scenes of gazillions of field mice over-running rice fields in Hunan, reminded me of rabbits swarming in Australia. Although rising flood waters were blamed for the mice infestation, natural enemies like snakes and owls have been eaten out of existence by the Chinese. One report estimated that residents consumed 3 tons of wild-caught snakes in Changsha, the provincial capital of Hunan everyday!

Now it seems that hungry Cantonese in Guangdong are happily importing the field mice for their dining tables. I hope they won't trigger off another new epidemic like SARS!

the man who fed China

recognition by netizens for the man behind high-yield hybrid rice in China.

excerpt from China Daily:

"Yuan, dubbed the 'father of hybrid rice', is an eminent agricultural researcher and was the first in the world to discover that hybrid rice yields a larger harvest, better resists disease and grows faster than non-hybrid rice.

This discovery helped solve China's food shortage of the 1960s and 1970s, and answered the question of the world in the late 1990s when some western politicians and scholars were worried that China's large population would trigger a worldwide famine, according to a Xinhuah report published on February 18, 2005.

Yuan began his research on hybrid rice in the 1960s, and achieved a major scientific breakthrough when he successfully developed the genetic materials essential for breeding high-yielding hybrid rice varieties in 1973.

He and his team produced a commercial hybrid rice variety based on his 'three-line system' hybrid rice theory in 1974, and gave it to nearly half of the rice production area in China.

Rice production in China increased by 500 billion kilograms using Yuan's growing techniques. The annual increase in production was enough to feed 60 million people for one year.

In 1979, the hybrid rice technique became the first Chinese technical patent in agriculture that was exported to the US.

On November 24, 2006, Yuan released a new variety of 'super rice' at a news conference in Hunan Province, which could yield a record 800 kilograms every mu (one fifteenth of a hectare)."