Suprising nuggets about poultry farming

Tom Philpott writes in Mother Jones about a new report on poultry farming from a group called Georgians for Pastured Poultry. An excerpt from Philpott's story:

"The poultry industry has alighted upon Georgia in a way it hasn't in any other individual state. According to the report, which is lavishly footnoted and was prepared with the help of grad students from Emory University's Department of Environmental Health, the U.S. now produces 8.84 billion broilers (meat chickens) every year—of which 1.4 billion, or nearly one in six, are produced in Georgia.

"The state's annual broiler flock, roughly equal in number to the human population of China, takes place on just 2,170 farms—meaning that each one produces a mind-numbing 640,000 birds, collectively churning 2 million tons of chicken litter (feces plus bedding and other waste).

"Concentrating so much waste, laced as it is with arsenic and antibiotic-resistant pathogens along with algae-feeding nitrogen and phosphorpus, is bound to cause problems, which are well laid out in this report."

Read the whole article on Mother Jones.

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Photo: iStockphoto.com.

How our earliest memories gel

Perri Klass, M.D. wrote about babies and memories in the New York Times Well blog. An excerpt:

"Several decades ago it was thought that very young infants did not have the capacity for forming memories, said Patricia Bauer, a professor of psychology at Emory University. As techniques have been developed for testing infants and very young children, it has been found that 'the neural structures creating those representations in infancy are qualitatively the same as in older children and adults,' she said.

"The crucial structure for episodic memory, the memory of autobiographical events, is the hippocampus, that little curved ridge in the middle of the brain whose shape reminded a 16th-century anatomist of a sea horse. Dr. Bauer compared memory forming to making gelatin: 'The experience is the liquid gelatin; you pour it into a mold. The mold is the hippocampus, and it has to go through a process of refrigeration known as consolidation.'

"So memories can form in even very young children, it seems. But it is not clear that they can be retrieved.

"Recent research suggests that some of those very early memories may actually be held into childhood, but then lost as children grow into adolescence. And research has also shown a strong cultural component to the question of how far back children remember."

Read the whole article on the New York Times web site.

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Study to track germs in airline cabins

By Jennifer Johnson, Woodruff Health Sciences Center

A new study is expected to provide the first detailed information on how infectious diseases may spread onboard commercial airliners. Sponsored by aircraft manufacturer Boeing, the research will document patterns of passenger movement inside aircraft cabins and inventory the microbes present in cabin air and on surfaces such as tray tables and lavatory fixtures.

Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University are working together on the three-year project, in collaboration with Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines.

"We will learn how people move around in aircraft and study the microbes that are there at different times during flights,” says Howard Weiss, a mathematician at Georgia Tech. "From that information, we can start modeling the disease transmission and developing intervention strategies."

In 2002, 20 people on an international flight were infected by a single SARS patient, which showed how air travel could serve as a conduit for the rapid spread of both emerging infections and pandemics of known diseases.

"By understanding the patterns of how infectious diseases may be transmitted from an infected person to an uninfected person, companies like Boeing may be able to design aircraft that better protect passengers and crew members," says Vicki Hertzberg, an associate professor in Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health.

The researchers will use sophisticated sampling equipment carried aboard the aircraft to gather information about what’s in the cabin air. They will also swipe certain touch surfaces, and both the wipes and air-sampling filters will be analyzed by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and mass spectrometry equipment to identify the microbes present.

To study passenger movements around the aircraft, the researchers plan to use a modern twist on an old-fashioned technique: Graduate students watching and recording movement on an iPad. "They will be actively looking at who’s getting up and down, when they are doing it, and where they are going when they do," Hertzberg explains. "We will need to do this at a fairly high resolution with respect to time and place."

Higher tax lowers smoking during pregnancy

By Jennifer Johnson, Woodruff Health Sciences Center

Higher taxes and smoke-free policies are reducing smoking among mothers-to-be, a new study by Emory University finds. The results will be published by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

The researchers evaluated smoking bans and taxes on cigarettes, along with the level of tobacco control spending, and found that state tobacco control policies can be effective in curbing smoking during pregnancy, and in preventing a return to smoking within four months on average, after delivery.

"We know from prior research that nearly one-fourth of all women in the United States enter pregnancy as smokers and more than half continue to smoke while they are pregnant which results in excessive healthcare costs at birth and beyond," says lead investigator Kathleen Adams, associate professor in the department of health policy and management at Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health. "This is one of the first studies of pregnant women's smoking in the new era of more restrictive state tobacco control policies, and we found a sizable increase in the quit rate. In addition, tax policies appear to be effective in keeping these women from relapsing in the first few months postpartum, and the implementation of a full workplace smoke-free policy also increases quits."

Sara Markowitz, associate professor of economics at Emory University co-authored the study.

Investigators determined that a $1 increase in taxes and prices increases the probability of quitting by the last three months of pregnancy by 4.8 percentage points – from 44.1 to 48.9 percent. The probability of having sustained nonsmoking four months after delivery is increased by 4.2 percentage points or from 21.3 to 25.5 percent, with a $1 increase in real taxes. A full ban on smoking at private worksites increased the probability of quitting smoking during pregnancy by 4-5 percentage points.

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Prometheus: Seeding wonder and science

Michael Fassbinder plays a robot attendant on the spaceship Prometheus.

In Greek mythology, Prometheus paid a heavy price for stealing fire from Zeus and giving it to mortals. The story is a powerful cautionary tale about the rewards and risks of striving for scientific knowledge.

Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus,” opening June 8, ratchets up the theme by adding space travel and all the special effects of Hollywood. The movie’s premise, that extraterrestrial engineers seeded Earth with their molecular basis, is a fitting story for our times, says David Lynn, chair of chemistry at Emory.

Lynn, an expert in chemical evolution, is studying how life evolved from the “warm pond” of early Earth, some 3.5 billion years ago. “All the life that we understand now depends on liquid water,” Lynn says. “Ironically enough, the liquid water on earth probably came from extrasolar sources and accumulated on earth after the planet was forming. So this notion of having our planet seeded by water and by other nutrients or even building blocks of life is something that we’ve known about for a long time.”



In addition to studying how life evolved on Earth, Lynn heads a scientific team that is developing parameters for NASA to search for extraterrestrial life. Powerful telescopes have revealed an extraordinary number of exoplanets in our galaxy. But where should we start looking for life beyond Earth, and how would we know it if we saw it?

The crew in the movie “Prometheus” is also seeking extraterrestrial life, but they have the benefit of a star map discovered among the ruins of an ancient Earth civilization.

Our species has a history of imaging alien life forms, Lynn says, pieced together from dreams and whatever data is available at the time.

These stories often have value beyond entertainment. “They can be motivators for our imaginations, and for more science to try to understand our place in this universe that we inhabit,” Lynn says. "That's what makes the stories we have so important."

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