Moments in science: Aha and Aha-haha

(Conclusion)

• A prize in chemistry went to a professor at Stanford University, Roger Kornberg, who was able to give us an actual molecular snapshot of our innermost "housing" (cells) and what kind of "renovation" happens inside. It looks like this: a bunch of noodle-like materials (RNA polymerase) serves as the perfect compartment for a sort of spiral staircase (DNA). This spiral breaks in part, as it makes a "negative" (RNA messenger) of that part and eventually also the other parts of the spiral, which in turn, reach out to receive signals from tissues. These "negatives" build parts of a house and eventually, the whole house. The "house" is really you or any organism, except bacteria. Genetic information in DNA inside eukaryotes (organisms with well-defined nucleus; includes organisms belonging to animals, plants, fungi and protoctista kingdoms) is converted to RNA messengers and then "relayed" to parts outside the nucleus which codes for proteins. These proteins provide the physiological umph to make the various structures inside organisms as well as their functions.

• A prize went to recognizing a study, published in no less than Lancet journals, as to why woodpeckers, in their characteristic tendency to bang their heads repeatedly to define territories, feed themselves and woe their mates, never get headaches. The awardees, Ivan Schwab of University of California Davis and Philip May of UCLA, even counted that woodpeckers, during the said season, bang their head onto trees 12,000 times a day! The human equivalent of this woodpecker imperative is banging your head against a brick wall at 15 miles per hour, 12,000 times a day! So kids (and men), do not try this at home.

• Another prize went to Wasmia Al-Houty of Kuwait University and Faten Al-Mussalam of the Kuwait Environment Public Authority for their 1997 study published in the Journal of Arid Environments, showing that even beetles which eat poop could be quite picky about the kind of poop they pop. Apparently, as far as dung beetles are concerned, not all poop are the same. The bright side is that it is a testament that everything about us is unique; the dark side is, it is still poop.

• A prize for medicine went to Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Mello for figuring out how to "duct tape" specific genes to keep them from expressing themselves. They called this mechanism "RNA interference (RNAi)" or gene silencing by double-stranded RNA. When DNA material sends info outside the nucleus, this is conveyed by messenger RNA (mRNA), which in turn, codes for genes that in turn, codes for proteins. The scientists discovered that when they plant double strands (single strands had no effect) of RNA molecules (that are identical to the mRNA) to interact with that mRNA, the specific gene is silenced and therefore, could not code for the proteins it handles. They did this to a worm to which they gave twitching problems when before it had none. This research is hailed in the medical research community as promising to a lot of further research on genetic diseases and we owe it to these fellows and their twitching worm.

• An award was given to an inventor, Howard Stapleton, whose contraption I wrote about a few columns back entitled "The Mosquitone and the Carillon." It is a teenage repellant, an elector-mechanical device that gives off a sound in a frequency that only teenagers can hear. He invented it because of his daughter’s failure to complete an errand to a store because of other teenagers lurking in the said store. I, however, think that teenagers are losing their hearing at a rate faster than the natural rate caused by aging. But to eliminate the possibility that I may just be growing cranky with age, I actually measured noise levels in a gym I go to. The noise levels turned out to range from 80 to100 decibels which are largely often the levels set by young people (by young, I mean 25 below) on the gym TV sets and the music for aerobics. Eighty to 100 decibels represent the noise level from a working tractor to a jackhammer. At the times that I would take out the decibel meter and start measuring noise, people in the gym just assumed that I just had a really old cellphone that had difficulty detecting a network signal. In the two weeks I gathered data, no one even asked me what I was doing.

• An award for Mathematics went to Australians Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization for doing the math in order to come up with the number of photographs needed to ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed. Entitled "Blink-Free Photos, Guaranteed," it appeared in the journal Velocity in June 2006. I still prefer the "ancient" way of preventing "closed eyes" on photo subjects, which many of you may remember also involved some kind of math – saying "1, 2, 3!" to warn subjects not to blink.

• Another award went to Bart Knols (of Wageningen Agricultural University, in Wageningen, the Netherlands; and of the National Institute for Medical Research, in Ifakara Center, Tanzania), who sniffed the insight that female malaria mosquito, Anopheles gambiae, is attracted equally to limberger cheese and smell of human feet. This was published in Lancet and several journals on insect studies. It was really not clear whose remarkably smelly feet were used to confuse the nose of the malaria mosquito. There was no word on the condition of the said mosquito as of this writing.

If you were able to guess that the three separate works by Smoot and Mather, Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Mello and by Roger Kornberg were the ones who won the Nobel awards in their respective science fields, you must have cheated. I am kidding. You are right to check that they are our 2006 Nobel Laureates for physics, medicine and chemistry, respectively.

I do not know about you but as far as fascination is concerned, I am as intrigued about breaking spaghetti as I am with ancient light; with stopping persistent hiccups as with shaking hands with the once mysterious codes written in my genes; in headache-proof woodpeckers as with the shape of DNA as it transcribes itself in RNA to create the protein-rich human that I am. These Nobel or IgNobel geeks change the way we look at nature and ourselves without having to threaten us at gunpoint or with missiles. They do it with evidence and careful study. They are all deep reminders that there is an endless list of things that we can take deep or belly-laugh pleasure in finding out. Everytime we do, it is as if we have locked eyes, even for just a blink, with a miniscule part of nature’s mysteries, and understood a little more. We assign meaning to the "discoveries," whether Nobel, IgNobel or personal and we feel that we have moved a little bit in our own quests to find out what this universe, in its enormity and detail, is all about. Science does not make the world go round but it is certainly one human endeavor that makes the ride worthwhile.

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