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Science Notes

Posted on: Tuesday, 23 December 2003, 06:00 CST

Limp lobster disease

Maine lobsters have long been plagued by an ailment called gaffkemia, a bacterial disease that kills the animals after turning their bluish blood pink. But lobster catchers from the region have been perplexed by the emergence of a new fatal disease -- one that causes weakness and lethargy and is known as limp lobster disease.

Limp lobster has resulted in millions of dollars in losses for the industry, but its cause has remained a mystery. Now researchers have found the culprits: several never-before-identified strains of bacteria. They are still unnamed but are related to another bacterium, Vibrio fluvialis, known to cause diseases in humans and fish.

Researchers from the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition in College Park, Md., and from the University of Maine's Lobster Institute in Orono recovered the bacteria from afflicted lobsters. Experiments showed that the microbes could cause the disease in healthy lobsters. The bacteria produce several potent toxins that account for their lethality, the researchers report in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

It is not clear why the bacteria suddenly appeared in the region in 1997, but the researchers suggest that global climate changes may have played a role.

-- Washington Post

Rover to check out Mars crater

The Gusev crater on Mars may not be what NASA thinks it is, a planetary scientist says.

On Jan. 3, the first of NASA's twin Mars Exploration Rovers will land inside Gusev crater. Among the spacecraft's goals: to study evidence of a lake that NASA says lay there for millions of years. In such an environment, scientists think, Martian life -- if it ever existed -- may have taken root.

But James Rice, a researcher at Arizona State University, says that the crater may never have been home to a lake. The layered sediments that have been interpreted as lake remains also appear in other craters in the region, he says. That suggests to him that some other process, such as wind, may have formed the layers.

"We'll see who's right in less than a month," Rice said in San Francisco at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

-- Dallas Morning News

Scans show brain has 'funnybone'

Heard the one about the scientist and the brain scan? A new study shows that humor tickles some of the same brain regions as cocaine.

Neuroscientists from Stanford University took pictures of the brains of 16 people as they looked at 42 funny and 42 unfunny cartoons. The funny ones activated areas known to be part of the brain's reward system, the scientists reported in the journal Neuron.

Understanding how humor works may help psychologists develop better treatments for people with depression and other brain disorders, the team suggests.

-- Dallas Morning News

Why sky is red in 'Scream'

The blood-red sky that appears to frighten the tormented figure in Edvard Munch's famous painting "The Scream" was probably caused by the faraway eruption of the volcano Krakatoa, a team of researchers has concluded after analyzing the background location, the artist's journals and reports of "Krakatoa twilights."

The team from Texas State University traveled to Oslo, and found the location of the painting's background. They also concluded that Munch would have been facing in the direction of a cloudscape that had been reddened by the explosion of the volcano. The massive eruption, in what is now Indonesia, occurred in 1883 and sent dust and gases high into the atmosphere, causing twilights to glow red around the world. The team found that Oslo newspapers reported the red sky was very visible at the time.

Earlier analyses have generally explained the bright red sky as a natural phenomenon in Norway during the late fall. The work was not painted until 1893, a decade after the eruption, and that delay was one reason that earlier researchers did not connect the painting's background with the volcano.

But the Texas team found journal entries by Munch alluding to the remarkably red sky he once saw in Oslo, when he "felt a great, unending scream piercing through nature." The research was reported in Sky & Telescope magazine.

-- Washington Post

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