Why Are Millions of Spiders Invading Thousands of Trees and Why Is It Good News?

These huge trees are fully covered with thousands of spiderwebs, something never before seen in Sindh, Pakistan, where this photo was taken. Yes, it's a eewrifying image, but it has had a surprisingly positive effect on the population of this heavily punished part of the world. How, you scream?

These spiders usually crawl on the ground but, when the massive July 2010 floods took over one fifth of the 307,374 square miles of Pakistani land, they escaped to the trees. The water is taking a long time to recede, so they thought it may be a good idea to adapt to the situation, establish camp and have a big party up there. The results is thousands of cocooned trees all around.

Gross? It is. But the United Kingdom's Department for International Development thinks that the massive spiderwebs are a blessing and the eight-legged furry beasties are Bill Gates' new best friends. It seems that these giant sticky pompoms are capturing mosquitoes by the truckload. According to the people in these areas, the mosquito levels are extremely low for this time of the year. Even more so taking into account the vast amount of stagnant water, which acts as a nursery for those bloody winged buggers. As a result, the risk of a malaria plague is a lot lower than what everyone was expecting.

In other words: Thank you, spiders! P.S. If I see any of you around my house, however, I'll smash you faster than Doctor Octopus.

Degradable Nanoparticles Bludgeon Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria

MRSA Cells With and Without Nanoparticles MRSA bacteria before, left, and after, right, incubation with a new biodegradable polymer nanoparticle. Cell destruction is clearly visible. The bottom two images are magnified with respect to the top images.

A new breed of biodegradable nanoparticles can glom on to drug-resistant bacteria, breaching their cell walls and leaking out their contents, selectively killing them. The polymer particles could someday be used in anything from injectable treatments for drug-resistant bacteria, to new antibacterial soaps and deodorants, according to inventors at IBM. After their work is done, the particles break apart, flushing away with the invaders they destroyed.

The nanoparticles, which IBM says are relatively inexpensive, were effective against bugs that have been evolving to resist antibiotics, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Preliminary results suggest the particles could also be effective against yeast, fungus and small bacteria like E. coli, IBM says. Research on the new particles is reported in this week's issue of the journal Nature Chemistry.

Antibiotics kill microorganisms in various ways, including interfering with their DNA or interacting with their ability to rebuild their cell walls, explains James Hedrick, advanced organic materials scientist and master inventor at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif. But some of the bugs survive the onslaught, leading to new generations of bacteria that won't succumb to the drugs.

A new class of positively charged plastic micro-machines, including IBM's nanoparticles, take a somewhat more physical approach.

"These are designed to slice the cell membrane, to rip the membrane up and eliminate the contents," Hedrick said. "It's kind of like the way a virus would work - a virus drills a pore, empties the contents and hijacks it. This is drilling in little holes, and all the contents leak out."

Transmission electron micrographs show it works: As the images show, the cell walls have been ruptured and everything inside is gone. The best part is that bacteria cannot evolve resistance because it's a physical attack, not a chemical one.

These particles are special because they self-assemble in water and are biodegradable, unlike other nanoparticle treatments. They're made of amphiphilic polycarbonate material, meaning some of the particles are water-loving and some are water-phobic. When exposed to fluids - like serum or blood - the polycarbonate self-assembles into clumps about 200 nanometers in size. Another part of the clump is positively charged, designed to match the negatively charged surface of microbes, Hedrick said.

Cell walls are dynamic barriers, constantly morphing and changing as they divide. When something binds to their surface, the walls' synthesis is interrupted. Penicillin, for instance, binds to an enzyme that helps build the walls. Hedrick and collaborators at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore say the charged particles interact with the cell walls to destabilize them.

"These particles are cationic (positively charged), so they are attracted to the microbial membrane surface, and it begins to disrupt that dynamic assembly process of the membrane," Hedrick said.

The authors also report that the particles can be used at relatively low concentrations. Hedrick said they're not sure what makes the particles so effective, but it's probably because they can each kill multiple cells, moving on to new targets after the membranes are so disfigured that static no longer binds the cells and nanoparticles together.

"A little of the polymer goes a long way," Hedrick said.

After a few days of this, enzymes start breaking apart the chains that hold the particles together, said Bob Allen, senior manager at IBM-Almaden's Advanced Materials Chemistry department.

"Think of the enzyme as a pair of scissors - it will go through and snip it. It's just a weak link that allows you to have a degradable system," he said.

The particles degrade to molecules of alcohol and carbon dioxide, which are removed just like anything else in the bloodstream.

IBM believes the particles could be a new way to treat drug-resistant bacteria, especially MRSA, which is frequently associated with hospital infections. The company says antibiotic-resistant bacteria is a fertile field for its polymer research labs - chemists do focus primarily on electronics, but chip-scale research translates well to research in health care, water purification, and energy, Allen said.

Hedrick and Allen cautioned that they're not clinicians and they don't know how the particles would be used. But they were optimistic about the possibilities.

"The applications are going to be very diverse, whether we're talking about wound healing or dressing, skin infection, and quite possibly injections into the bloodstream," Hedrick said. "But this is way early in the discovery process to be going there."

Resourceful Nebraskan Moron Sucks Change from Laundry Machines with Backpack Vacuum

This is an odd convergence of ingenuity and idiocy: a man tried to clean out (tee hee) the coin coffers of an apartment laundry room with a backpack-mounted vacuum cleaner. He netted $20! And was then arrested.

The saddest part of this story? The local news report's claim that he "no longer has the vacuum." Well now he's just going to have to steal one of those too! Also noted is his prior criminal record, including the theft of "an artificial Christmas tree from the Salvation Army and 32 pallets from Super Saver." This man is clearly the Lex Luther of petty, strange, Midwestern crime. He even sort of looks like a supervillain.

Meal Snap Photographs Your Food and Automatically Estimates the Calories You Ate

Meal Snap is a neat app that photographs your food, uploads the picture, and then replies with a calorie count in just a few seconds. And it works surprisingly well.
This seems like the sort of thing that wouldn't actually work, but it's surprisingly impressive. I took pictures of some leftover steamed veggies in my fridge and it gave me a pretty accurate calorie count. While I can't be sure, I'd imagine these counts are looked up by actual people as you get a faster response if you name your food rather than simply photograph it. That said, I took a picture of some brownies I made last night and, although Meal Snap's horde of calorie counters thought it was chocolate cake, the calorie count was pretty much spot on. It even gave me a calorie count for a bag of dog bones. It's fast, it works, and is excellent if you're trying to count calories but hate the tedious task of looking up every food you ate after every meal.

Meal Snap is available on the iTunes App Store, right now, for $3.

Nanoparticle Rubber Stamps Could Help Heal Wounds

You know the UV-ink rubber stamps that night clubs like to stick on your skin? Well, a novel silver nanotech variant of the idea could actually help heal your skin wounds more quickly.

Silverware became popular centuries ago partly because it was a precious metal and thus a status symbol, but also because the health qualities of silver have been known since Roman times. Back then wealthy folks even gave their kids a silver spoon to suck on to ward-off the plague (hence the saying). Modern science understands how silver has anti-bacterial qualities, but the trick in delivering silver accurately into a wound nowadays is getting the dosage right since silver is toxic in high concentrations. That's what research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is tackling, with a novel delivery approach for silver nanoparticles.

The research team has perfected a way of delivering silver nanoparticles onto skin in a layer just a few molecules thick—thereby forming an excellent barrier but not over-dosing the region and killing skin cells—by borrowing a technique that's long been used to apply ink in molecule-thick layers: Rubber stamping. The polyelectrolyte multilayer coating, mixed with micrometer-sized beads of silver nanoparticles (which the team found was the most efficient way to ensure delivery) was "assembled" on a rubber stamp and was then placed on wounds from cadaver skin to test its efficiency.

Small doses of bacteria (common skin bacteria staphylococcus epidermidis and pseudomonas aeruginosa—both of which can run rampant and cause infections) were applied to the area. After roughly 12 hours 99.999% of the bacteria were killed and the bacteria-defeating effect was still reliable up to around 48 hours.

To check that the treatment didn't actually interfere with normal wound-healing, the scientists tried it on diabetic mice and are currently investigating wound healing on mice and pigs (particularly interesting as pig skin is analogous to human skin in many ways).

So in the future, a trip to ER to stitch a wound could result in patients wearing a rubber stamp healing treatment, too.

How Does the Mona Lisa Look Without Mona Lisa?

Recognize this 77 x 54-centimeter oil on canvas painting? Believe it or not, it's perhaps the best-known Leonardo da Vinci painting this side of The Last Supper.

Yes, it's the Mona Lisa without Mona Lisa, as interpreted by Adobe Photoshop CS5.

Artist Mike Ruiz got a high resolution photograph of Leonardo's art, scanned it in Photoshop, selected the smily girl, and used content-aware fill in Photoshop CS5, a tool that borders in witchcraft—so much that it may make sandwiches for you (almost).
Adobe's tool interpreted the surroundings and generated the complete background in place of the mysterious woman, who apparently was Jesus or his daughter or his third cousin or whatever. One of those. After clicking the OK button, Ruiz sent the result to China, where artists used the image to actually create the oil painting in the same style as da Vinci himself.

Finally, Bacon Cologne!

No longer do you have to dribble bacon down your chin to get a hint of pig on your throat—perfumers Fargginay have invented bacon cologne which has a mix of 11 essential oils in both the Gold (citrus) and Classic (spicy maple) variants, which cost $36 each.

I like Fargginay's little accent over the "o." Really classy.