Discover Magazine | Vaccines

Can Stuffing Germs up Ferrets Unleash a Human Pandemic?

Fri, 18 May 2012 17:15:00 -0400

The Claim: A lab-concocted strain of ferret flu could become a doomsday weapon or bioterrorist threat.

The Contrarian: Wendy Orent, author of Plague, says the much-hyped fears are unfounded: The new strain presents no danger to humans but reveals a great deal about the transmission of flu.

Ferrets with the flu sneeze and cough like humans.

iStockphoto

Deadly H5N1 avian flu, long entrenched in Asian poultry, has terrified public health experts ever since it killed a Hong Kong boy in 1997. The disease has caused about 340 human deaths in all, raising concerns it might someday unleash a true pandemic. But that has never occurred. The virus is adept at killing chickens and can infect mammals, but it has never spread among them. Until recently no one knew why...

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Allergies

Fri, 18 May 2012 10:15:00 -0400

1. Our immune system may be like those small bands of Japanese “holdout” soldiers after World War II. Not knowing that the war was over, they hid for years, launching guerrilla attacks on peaceful  villages.

2. With our living environment well scrubbed of germs, our body’s immune “soldiers” mistakenly fire on innocent peanuts and cat dander.

5. Most food allergies result from an immune response to a protein. In 2004 a team at Trinity College Dublin tried to counter that reaction by injecting mice with parasites, giving the animals’ immune systems the sort of threat they evolved to fight, thus distracting them from the food proteins.

6. The experiment worked.

7. Excited by such findings, in 2007 British-born entrepreneur Jasper Lawrence flew to Cameroon and walked barefoot near some latrines. His aim was to acquire hookworms, which he hoped would defeat his asthma and seasonal allergies.

8. That worked too.

9. Lawrence has since started a business shipping the parasites worldwide (but not here, where the FDA prohibits it). For $3,000, customers receive up to 35 hookworm larvae...

Editor's Note: Life and Death

Thu, 17 May 2012 12:25:00 -0400

Let me say up front: I am a registered organ donor. I joined the ranks just a few weeks ago when I renewed my driver’s license and discovered—much to my surprise—that I had forgotten to check the donor box when I got my first New York license years ago. This time I signed up without a moment’s hesitation. Organ transplants save thousands of lives in the United States every year, and if I had a fatal accident or disease I would certainly want my death to assist someone else’s life. Enlisting as a donor is one of the easiest forms of altruism around.

So it was with some trepidation that I agreed to publish Dick Teresi’s cover story, “The Beating Heart Donors.”  Not because of its actual thesis, which I find fascinating and powerful, but because of the way the piece could be easily  misconstrued. Many people already feel queasy about signing up to donate their organs; anything that increases those anxieties could have unfortunate consequences...

The Brain: Hidden Epidemic:  Tapeworms Living Inside People's Brains

Tue, 15 May 2012 11:00:00 -0400

Theodore Nash sees only a few dozen patients a year in his clinic at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. That’s pretty small as medical practices go, but what his patients lack in number they make up for in the intensity of their symptoms. Some fall into comas. Some are paralyzed down one side of their body. Others can’t walk a straight line. Still others come to Nash partially blind, or with so much fluid in their brain that they need shunts implanted to relieve the pressure. Some lose the ability to speak; many fall into violent seizures.

Underneath this panoply of symptoms is the same cause, captured in the MRI scans that Nash takes of his patients’ brains. Each brain contains one or more whitish blobs. You might guess that these are tumors. But Nash knows the blobs are not made of the patient’s own cells. They are tapeworms. Aliens.

A blob in the brain is not the image most people have when someone mentions tapeworms. These parasitic worms are best known in their adult stage, when they live in people’s intestines and their ribbon-shaped bodies can grow as long as 21 feet. But that’s just one stage in the animal’s life cycle. Before they become adults, tapeworms spend time as larvae in large cysts. And those cysts can end up in people’s brains, causing a disease known as neurocysticercosis.

“Nobody knows exactly how many people there are with it in the United States,” says Nash, who is the chief of the Gastrointestinal Parasites Section at NIH...

Image: A human brain overrun with cysts from Taenia solium, a tapeworm that normally inhabits the muscles of pigs. Courtesy of Theodore E. Nash , M.D.

Discover Interview: The World's Most Celebrated Virus Hunter: Ian Lipkin

Fri, 11 May 2012 12:05:00 -0400

When Ian Lipkin chose a career in infectious diseases, he envisioned hunting for pathogens in daring treks around the world. Though disappointed to learn that modern-day virus hunters work largely from the lab, he still wound up a pioneer. At the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, then at the University of California, Irvine, and since 2001 as director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Lipkin has developed groundbreaking techniques that have helped a new generation of disease detectives sleuth out the infectious roots of mystery ills, chronic disease, and neuropsychiatric disorders like autism and OCD. Lipkin’s signature invention is a technology called Mass Tag PCR, which searches through large numbers of known viral and bacterial genomes to identify a culprit in a few hours. He often complements this test with others, including microbial detection microchips (GreeneChips) and gene sequencers that can complete an exhaustive search for known and unknown pathogens within a tissue sample in less than a day.

When DISCOVER features editor Pamela Weintraub interviewed Lipkin last year, he had to cut his workday short because his dog, Koprowski—a gift from Polish virologist Hilary Koprowski—was desperately sick. Lipkin had a treatment plan: not an antiviral drug or chemotherapy, but red meat. “It has antibiotics, it has growth hormone, it has everything. Koprowski’s my best friend in the world,” he explained before descending into the subway and heading home.

You were in the first class of men at Sarah Lawrence, where you studied anthropology, even shamanism. Yet you are known for hunting pathogens. How did that come about?
 I felt that if I went straight into cultural anthropology after college I’d be a parasite. I’d go someplace, take information about myths and ritual, and have nothing to offer. So I decided to become a medical anthropologist and try to bring back traditional medicines. Suddenly I found myself in medical school.

 But you didn’t become a medical anthropologist. Instead you studied neurological disease and infection. Why?
 By 1977 I had gotten a fellowship at the Institute for Neurology in London, where a professor named John Newsom-Davis was working on myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disorder characterized by weakness often so profound that people lose their ability to breathe. Back then, nobody really understood what the disorder was. John was trying something new, treating it with plasmapheresis...

Vital Signs: "We Can Take His Heart Out, Remove the Tumor, and Put It Back In"

Wed, 09 May 2012 09:35:00 -0400

I was in the middle of a normal clinic day, seeing candidates for surgery, when a nurse told me that one of them had arrived with a diagnostic video. When I had a free moment, I walked over to a computer and put the CD into the drive. As the program booted up, I noticed that the video was a cardiac MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) study. I clicked through the images, and what I saw was frightening. A large mass was growing in the patient’s heart, in the back wall of the left atrial chamber, perhaps the worst possible place to have a problem like this. The right atrium and both ventricles

are somewhat accessible to the surgeon’s knife. But the left atrium at the back of the heart next to the spine is a difficult, if not impossible, area to reach.

As I watched the video, more details emerged. As the left atrium attempted to pump blood, the wall opposite the growth ballooned out awkwardly instead of contracting with the rest of the chamber, its movement altered by the growth. The mass also took up a lot of space and was impeding blood flow. If it got just 5 percent larger, the chamber would be almost completely obstructed, resulting in a high risk of sudden death...

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Science  Fraud

Tue, 08 May 2012 10:50:00 -0400

1. What evil lurks in the hearts of scientists? Behavioral ecologist Daniele Fanelli knows. In a meta-analysis of 18 surveys of researchers, he found only 2 percent ’fessed up to falsifying or manipulating data...but 14 percent said they knew a colleague who had.

5 If caught stealing someone else’s ideas, scientists have a handy defense: cryptomnesia, the idea that a person can experience a memory as a new, original thought.

8 Even geniuses succumb to temptation. Researchers have found that Isaac Newton fudged numbers in his Principia, generally considered the greatest physics text ever written.

9 Other legends who seem to have altered data: Freud, Darwin, and Pasteur.

10 And Austrian monk Gregor Mendel’s famous pea-breeding experiments—the foundation of modern ideas of heredity—are suspiciously good, matching his theory of genetic inheritance a little too well.

18 Write what you know: Harvard evolutionary psychologist Marc Hauser resigned last year after he was found guilty of eight counts of scientific misconduct. Now he’s working on a book, reportedly titled Evilicious: Explaining Our Evolved Taste for Being Bad.

The Beating Heart Donors

Wed, 02 May 2012 11:45:00 -0400

in 1968, thirteen men gathered at the Harvard Medical School to virtually undo 5,000 years of the study of death. In a three-month period, the Harvard committee (full name: the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death) hammered out a simple set of criteria that today allows doctors to declare a person dead in less time than it takes to get a decent eye exam. A good deal of medical language was used, but in the end the committee’s criteria switched the debate from biology to philosophy. Before many years went by, it became accepted by most of the medical establishment that death wasn’t defined by a heart that could not be restarted, or lungs that could not breathe. No, you were considered dead when you suffered a loss of personhood.

But before we see what substituting philosophy for science actually means to real patients, let’s look at the criteria the Harvard authors believed indicated that a patient had a “permanently nonfunctioning brain”:

• Unreceptivity and unresponsivity. “Even the most intensely painful stimuli evoke no vocal or other response, not even a groan, withdrawal of a limb or quickening of respiration,” by the committee’s standard.

• No movements or spontaneous breathing (being aided by a respirator does not count). Doctors must watch patients for at least one hour to make sure they make no spontaneous muscular movements or spontaneous respiration. To test the latter, physicians are to turn off the respirator for three minutes to see if the patient attempts to breathe on his own (the apnea test).

• No reflexes. To look for reflexes, doctors are to shine a light in the eyes to make sure the pupils are dilated. Muscles are tested. Ice water is poured in the ears.

• Flat EEG. Doctors should use electroencephalography, a test “of great confirmatory value,” to make sure that the patient has flat brain waves.

The committee said all of the above tests had to be repeated at least 24 hours later with no change, but it added two caveats: hypothermia and drug intoxication can mimic brain death. And since 1968, the list of mimicking conditions has grown longer.

Although the Harvard criteria were based on zero patients and no experiments were conducted either with humans or animals, they soon became the standard for declaring people dead in several states, and in 1981, the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) was sanctioned by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws. The UDDA is based on the Harvard Ad Hoc Committee’s report. That a four-page article defining death should be codified by all 50 states within 13 years is staggering...

The Big, Overlooked Factor in the Rise of Pandemics: The Human Vector

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 12:55:00 -0400

“How do you make preparedness sexy?” Dave Daigle asks. A communications expert in disaster readiness at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Daigle created last year’s cheeky Zombie Apocalypse campaign, designed to teach the social media generation how to survive natural disasters and uncontained infectious outbreaks. He never expected the associated Twitter campaign to crash his server and ultimately garner three billion hits. The whole initiative, the most successful in CDC public-relations history, cost taxpayers all of $87—for clip art.

The Zombie Apocalypse campaign instructs you how to prepare for pandemics and catastrophes like hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods. You need a plan. You need flashlights, an all-weather radio, bottled water. You need food you can stock, like peanut butter, canned tuna, and crackers. You need first-aid supplies like bandages, antiseptics, and soap. And you need somewhere safe to stay—a basement room, preferably windowless, where you can hole up for several days until the danger is past.

That style of preparation also resonates with the plots of popular disease-disaster movies, like the recent Contagion. The film presents a fictional virus, a construct devised by Columbia University epidemiologist Ian Lipkin, vectoring its way across the planet, killing millions of the fecklessly unprepared and leaving social havoc and innumerable bodies in its wake. The CDC campaign and the film spring from the same conviction: Since nature can always turn on us, we had better be ready for the consequences.

This kind of preparedness for natural catastrophes makes sense, but for pandemics the idea rings false; unlike the scenario in Contagion, pandemics don’t spring on us like hurricanes. Instead, they are overwhelmingly social phenomena. Mother Nature doesn’t create them; human beings do. We create the settings that allow new, deadly diseases to evolve and invade. Understanding those settings, which can be thought of as disease factories, and taking steps to disrupt them are far better preparation than sending families down to huddle in the basement...

Gallery | Our Wonderful Age of Abundance, in 9 Striking Infographics

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 09:40:00 -0400

Click through to view gallery

Gallery | 6 Creepy-Crawlies We Hate But Couldn't Do Without

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 13:55:00 -0400

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Numbers: The Majority of Minors Have Faced Mental Illness

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 15:35:00 -0400

82.5: The percentage of children and young adults who exhibit significant symptoms of mental illness at some point between the ages of 9 and 21. The startling statistic comes from a collaborative study conducted by Duke University and the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, which surveyed 1,420 children over 12 years beginning in 1993. Investigators checked in up to nine times to test for anxiety, depression, addiction, obsessive-compulsive  disorder, and more. The results...

Juicers, Trippers, and Crocodiles: The Dangerous World of Underground Chemistry

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 12:45:00 -0400

Nobody dreams of growing up and landing a low-paying job in New Jersey making chemicals used in shampoos and hair gels. And on those long, tedious days back in 1991 when a 24-year-old lab technician named Patrick Arnold stood alone in a room stirring thickening agents into smelly vats of goo, there was plenty of time to reflect on the twists of fate that had condemned him to work in a place where “nothing interesting ever happened,” in a job that was “just going nowhere.”

It took months to find the way out, but the path was there in front of him all along. Arnold was an avid weight lifter, cursed with an average build that had long ago stopped cooperating with his efforts to get bigger. Even so, every night after work he would head to one of several gyms where he pumped iron and talked shop with other muscleheads. The conversation would often turn to anabolic steroids. Arnold had majored in chemistry at the University of New Haven, and those weight-room discussions got him thinking.

One afternoon after starting the day’s reactions at work, Arnold marched down the hall to the chemistry library on his floor and looked up the molecular structures of the steroids mentioned in his muscle magazines. Anabolic steroids, which are essentially synthetic testosterone, had only just been declared controlled substances, so there was still an awful lot of information available about them.

It wasn’t long before it hit him: “I hate my job, I’m sitting here, I’ve got a lab—I can try making some of these things myself. No one will even know what the hell I’m doing.” Arnold added the steroid precursors he would need to the regular list of laboratory chemicals he ordered through the company, and nobody was the wiser...

Big Idea: Turning Lymph Nodes Into Liver-Growing Factories

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 13:15:00 -0400

For people suffering from advanced liver disease, the prognosis is bleak. In many patients, such as those with cirrhosis, the liver becomes so clogged with scar tissue that healthy cells are choked off, preventing it from fulfilling its role of filtering toxins. The only cure is a liver transplant. Yet with just 6,000 available organs for some 100,000 patients each year, chances of winning the liver lottery are slim. And if you’re elderly or suffering from another disease, the chances  are closer to zero.

But a surprising new technique under development by University of Pittsburgh stem cell researcher Eric Lagasse may radically improve those odds. Lagasse, based at Pitt’s McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, has discovered how to turn any one of the body’s 500 lymph nodes—the small, oval-shaped organs where immune cells gather to fight invading pathogens—into an incubator that can grow an entirely new liver. Creating a whole set of miniature new livers might take as little as obtaining liver cells from healthy donors and placing them inside the lymph nodes of patients suffering from liver disease.

The concept was born in 2007, while Lagasse was pondering how to overcome a major roadblock to liver regeneration—in those with liver disease, the organ forms scar tissue that destroys its ability to heal. But then he noticed emerging evidence that transplanted liver cells could survive in unusual areas of the body, for instance under the renal capsule, a fibrous layer that protects the kidney from trauma. Lagasse reasoned that if he could implant liver cells away from the diseased organ, instead of succumbing they just might multiply and thrive...

Liver image: iStockphoto

Vital Signs: Boys and Brains and Genes

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 12:00:00 -0400

The five-year-old ran into my exam room with his mother trailing behind. He wore a Transformers T-shirt and jeans that each bore signs of a recent encounter with a chocolate bar. Immediately he took a toy train apart and scattered the pieces all over the floor. “The kindergarten teacher said she doesn’t think Jason belongs in the class,” the mother said to me. “But we’re not sure.” Jason’s pediatrician had referred him to me because of his hyperactive behavior. “New patient to me,” her note said. “No old records available. Very hyperactive, difficult to examine, possible  developmental delay: refer to developmental pediatrician.”

Having been a general pediatrician for many years before specializing in developmental pediatrics, I sympathized with her. The 20 minutes allotted for a standard exam wasn’t nearly enough to try to figure out what was going on with this child.

Jason was now busy with a ball, but then quickly moved to a book and began turning the pages and pointing to every picture, labeling each one: “House! Duck! Train!” Then he was off to crash two trucks together.

His mother looked at him uncomfortably, clearly unsure whether she should try to guide him or let him alone. “It’s ok, nothing here is breakable,” I reassured her. “Tell me what he’s like at home.”

“He’s into everything, just like he is here,” she said. “He can’t sit still for a minute. That’s probably why the kindergarten teacher doesn’t think he belongs there. But...” She paused, as if trying to decide whether or not to say something...

Image: Shutterstock

You Can Teach an Old Drug New Tricks

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 12:35:00 -0400

Old drugs often get a surprising second life. In just the past few weeks, the news has buzzed about a skin cancer drug that may cure Alzheimer's, an osteoporosis medication that can kill malaria parasites, a leukemia drug that inhibits the Ebola virus, and many more.

These drugs and their newly discovered possible uses are just a reflection of how modern drug discovery works. Sometimes it is pure serendipity: a curious and surprising side effect pops up in clinical trials. Other times, we've stacked the odds by testing drugs already approved for one use to see if they can treat other conditions. Since these known drugs have already been proven relatively safe, their clinical trials involve less hassle and expense...

Image: iStockphoto

Numbers: The Critical Distraction Index

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 10:10:00 -0400

55: The percentage of technicians admitting they talk on cell phones while monitoring the machines that keep blood pumping during open-heart surgery. Professors who teach technicians at SUNY Upstate Medical University surveyed 439 bypass machine operators in 2010, also learning that 50 percent texted during surgery, even though 78 percent believe phone use could put patient safety at risk. “Behind the machine there’s a lot you do subconsciously. It’s like driving a car,” says study author Bruce Searles. “Sometimes there are less than 10 seconds to respond if something goes wrong.”

So why are operators on their phones? “These are not just distractions but essential tools,” says Searles...

The Lethal Gene That Emerged in Ancient Palestine and Spread Around the Globe

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 09:20:00 -0500

iStockphoto

Shonnie Medina was a happy  girl who felt she would die young.

Her physical beauty, when she was a young woman in Culebra and a young wife in Alamosa, was the primary thing that people mentioned about her. Photographs and snatches of videotape don’t quite capture it because fundamentally what people were talking about was charisma. It came through her looks when she was in front of you, tossing her full head of dark hair and giving you her full attention. Then her beauty acted like a mooring for her other outward qualities, undulating from that holdfast like fronds of kelp on the sea. Then Shonnie was magnetic, vain, kind to others, religious without reservation, funny, a little goofy, and headstrong.

The gene Shonnie inherited, known as BRCA1.185delAG, also has a long pedigree. Its discovery in the Hispano community confirmed events of half a millennium before in Spain that are echoing still. Most likely the mutation arrived by way of Sephardic Jews who converted to Catholicism under pressure from the Spanish Inquisition. From Spain they traveled to the New World, where eventually they seeded the modern Hispano population. Indian blood and new terrain erased part of the history those emigrants carried, assuming they were even aware of their Jewish legacy. For the Hispano Catholic people of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, Jewish ancestry was a will-o’-the-wisp of memory and culture, which many people had heard about without knowing if it was true. Shonnie’s mutation shows that it is.

The breast-cancer mutation 185delAG entered the gene pool of Jews some 2,500 years ago, around the time they were exiled to Babylon. Random and unbidden, the mutation appeared on the chromosome of a single person, who is known as the founder. In the same sense that Abraham is said to have founded the Jewish people, scientists call the person at the top of a genetic pyramid a founder...

Of Mice and Men and Medicines

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 09:55:00 -0500

You won’t find more mentally ill mice per square mile anywhere than in Bar Harbor, Maine. Mice who seem anxious or depressed, autistic or schizophrenic—they congregate here. Mice who model learning disabilities or anorexia; mice who hop around as though your hyperactive nephew had contracted into a tiny fur ball; they are here too. Name an affliction of the human mind, and you can probably find its avatar on this sprucy, secluded island.

The imbalanced mice are kept under the strictest security, in locked wards at the Jackson Laboratory, a nonprofit biomedical facility internationally renowned for its specially bred deranged rodents. Every day trucks carry away boxes and boxes of them for distribution to psychiatric researchers across the nation.

There are no visiting hours, because strangers fluster the mice and might carry in contagious diseases. The animals are attended only by highly qualified caregivers, people like neuroscientist Elissa Chesler. Sitting in her airy Jackson Lab office, accessible to germy and perturbing strangers, Chesler clicks open a series of photographs from a type of mouse personality test on her computer screen. The first picture shows a mouse sleeping on a nestlet, a stiff, square bed of compressed cotton. Mice typically gnaw vigorously at the cotton, shredding it to make soft igloos for sleeping and staying warm. The second image shows a mouse that has propped his nestlet against a wall, forming a makeshift lean-to. “When I see this guy, I’m thinking anxiety,” says Chesler, whose research delves into the genetics of stress. “This design isn’t trapping a lot of heat, but he’s secure under there.”

She smiles as she clicks open the last photo. “And here we have the ‘I can’t deal with it’ mouse,” she says. The image shows a mouse asleep, with his rigid nestlet balanced on his back. Personality, Chesler maintains, can be read from these nestlet styles more clearly than from a test of forced swimming or bar pressing...

There's a Shot for That

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 12:55:00 -0500

Two centuries ago Edward Jenner administered the first scientifically developed vaccine, injecting fluid from a dairymaid’s skin lesion into an 8-year-old boy. The English physician knew that dairymaids who contracted cowpox, a comparatively mild skin disease, became immune to the much deadlier smallpox, which at the time killed 400,000 Europeans a year. Jenner hoped the fluid from the cowpox lesion would somehow inoculate the boy against the smallpox scourge.  His hunch proved correct. Today vaccines (vaccinia is Latin for “cowpox”) of all forms save 3 million lives per year worldwide, and at a bargain price. A measles shot, for instance, costs less than a dollar per dose.

By training the human immune system to recognize and ward off dangerous pathogens, vaccines can protect against disease for decades, or even for a lifetime. Preventive vaccines work by introducing harmless microbial chemical markers, known as antigens, which resemble the markers on living microbes. The antigens train the immune system to recognize and destroy those microbes should they ever appear in the body. By injecting cowpox antigens into his patients’ bloodstream, for instance, Jenner primed their immune systems to attack the similar smallpox virus.

Today medical scientists are taking  Jenner’s ideas in new directions. They are exploiting a growing understanding of the immune system to develop therapeutic vaccines: ones aimed not at preventing infection but at rooting out established disease or even changing how the body functions...

Strong Medicine, Bitter Pills

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:55:00 -0500

65,000: Average number of children under the age of 5 admitted to emergency rooms annually for accidental ingestion of medications, according to a study published in the Journal of Pediatrics in September. Researchers drew on patient records of 453,559 children, collected by poison control centers in the United States between 2001 and 2008. Over that time, the number of er visits due to the swallowing of painkillers jumped 101 percent. Randall Bond, an er doctor and pediatrician at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital who led the study, says the uptick coincides with a dramatic boost in sales of opioid drugs...

How I Put a Murderer Away With Doppler Radar

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 11:20:00 -0500

For years, Howard Altschule worked as a meteorologist for television station WNYT in Albany, New York, where each night he told viewers whether the next day would bring precipitation and misery. It was a fun gig for a while, but then Altschule grew bored. So in 2007 he started Forensic Weather Consultants, which offers meteorological snooping to local lawyers, providing expert analysis of weather data and satellite imagery. Now he investigates 175 cases a year: roof damage, slips and falls—even a gruesome double murder. In his own words, here’s how he solved that case in May, helping send Michael Mosley to prison for life.

The police had arrested someone, but then they found Mosley’s blood in the Troy, New York, apartment where the murder occurred. Years and years went by, until one day they came up with a DNA match...

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Alcohol

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 12:15:00 -0500

iStockphoto

1. Sobering disclaimer: The family of compounds known as alcohols are all toxins that can kill you, whether instantly, quickly, or gradually.

2. Yet one of them—ethyl alcohol, or ethanol—is a staple of the human diet. Archaeologist Patrick McGovern speculates that fermented beverages were made as early as 100,000 years ago, when people first spread out of Africa.

3. The seeds Johnny Appleseed sold to farmers throughout Ohio and Indiana produced apples that were inedible, but perfect for making hard cider.

4. According to the Drunken Monkey Hypothesis, our zest for alcoholic beverages derives from our distant ancestors’ impulse to seek the ripest, most energy-intensive fruits.

5. Designated driver at the zoo: The Malaysian pen-tailed treeshrew routinely chugs the equivalent of nine glasses of wine a night in naturally fermented nectar, and yet it remains fully functional.

6. For a treeshrew, that is...

Discover Magazine | Vaccines

Can Stuffing Germs up Ferrets Unleash a Human Pandemic?

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Allergies

Editor's Note: Life and Death

The Brain: Hidden Epidemic:  Tapeworms Living Inside People's Brains

Discover Interview: The World's Most Celebrated Virus Hunter: Ian Lipkin

Vital Signs: "We Can Take His Heart Out, Remove the Tumor, and Put It Back In"

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Science  Fraud

The Beating Heart Donors

The Big, Overlooked Factor in the Rise of Pandemics: The Human Vector

Gallery | Our Wonderful Age of Abundance, in 9 Striking Infographics

Gallery | 6 Creepy-Crawlies We Hate But Couldn't Do Without

Numbers: The Majority of Minors Have Faced Mental Illness

Juicers, Trippers, and Crocodiles: The Dangerous World of Underground Chemistry

Big Idea: Turning Lymph Nodes Into Liver-Growing Factories

Vital Signs: Boys and Brains and Genes

You Can Teach an Old Drug New Tricks

Numbers: The Critical Distraction Index

The Lethal Gene That Emerged in Ancient Palestine and Spread Around the Globe

Of Mice and Men and Medicines

There's a Shot for That

Strong Medicine, Bitter Pills

How I Put a Murderer Away With Doppler Radar

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Alcohol

Top 100 Stories of 2011: #10: Immune  Supercells Purge Leukemia

Top 100 Stories of 2011: #87: First Posthumous  Nobel Awarded

Discover Magazine | Vaccines

Can Stuffing Germs up Ferrets Unleash a Human Pandemic?

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Allergies

Editor's Note: Life and Death

The Brain: Hidden Epidemic: Tapeworms Living Inside People's Brains

Discover Interview: The World's Most Celebrated Virus Hunter: Ian Lipkin

Vital Signs: "We Can Take His Heart Out, Remove the Tumor, and Put It Back In"

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Science Fraud

The Beating Heart Donors

The Big, Overlooked Factor in the Rise of Pandemics: The Human Vector

Gallery | Our Wonderful Age of Abundance, in 9 Striking Infographics

Gallery | 6 Creepy-Crawlies We Hate But Couldn't Do Without

Numbers: The Majority of Minors Have Faced Mental Illness

Juicers, Trippers, and Crocodiles: The Dangerous World of Underground Chemistry

Big Idea: Turning Lymph Nodes Into Liver-Growing Factories

Vital Signs: Boys and Brains and Genes

You Can Teach an Old Drug New Tricks

Numbers: The Critical Distraction Index

The Lethal Gene That Emerged in Ancient Palestine and Spread Around the Globe

Of Mice and Men and Medicines

There's a Shot for That

Strong Medicine, Bitter Pills

How I Put a Murderer Away With Doppler Radar

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Alcohol

Top 100 Stories of 2011: #10: Immune Supercells Purge Leukemia

Top 100 Stories of 2011: #87: First Posthumous Nobel Awarded

The Brain: Hidden Epidemic:  Tapeworms Living Inside People's Brains

20 Things You Didn't Know About... Science  Fraud

Top 100 Stories of 2011: #10: Immune  Supercells Purge Leukemia

Top 100 Stories of 2011: #87: First Posthumous  Nobel Awarded