…and I think I’m in love.

Probably one of the strangest videos I’ve seen in awhile. Not as strange as the Residents…but still good enough to for this guy to give it thumbs up.

Here’s an interesting story out of Florida…it seems they have a widespread outbreak of Dengue fever.

Dengue is an interesting virus…it’s an arbovirus, which means it’s a virus spread by arthropods. In this case, it’s a mosquito.

So…let’s talk about Dengue.

What is it, what vectors it, how does it reproduce inside the vector and what can we do to control the vectors?

Dengue is a type of RNA virus called a Flavivirus. Instead of DNA, it’s genome uses RNA which is directly translated into proteins.There are four different types of dengue, but all of them have the same symptoms. You get sick with one, and you feel like you’re being ground into a pulp…it’s also known as break-bone fever. Get another serotype, your immune system attacks itself, causing you to bleed from every orifice of your body. This virus is really bad news. Even worse, this virus uses mosquitoes to spread. Mosquitoes are everywhere here in Iowa, and they’re probably not much better in Florida.

Interestingly, Aedes albopictus outcompetes Aedes aegypti wherever it’s established, and this mosquito ranges up to at least New Jersey. Even scarier…the mosquitoes which vector this virus feed mainly on people.

There are two main vectors of dengue in Florida…Aedes albopictus and Aedes aegypti. Both of these mosquitoes are very well adapted to living around humans. It’s their home turf. Their native environment. They’re damn good at globehopping, too. Better than say…Anopheles gambiae

Aedes aegypti and albopictus are spread throughout the world by transport ships. Let’s say that a transport ship docks in Africa during a rainstorm and some Aedes and Anopheles chicks drop by and lay their eggs. The Aedes girl will lay her eggs slightly above the water line, while the Anopheles girl will lay her eggs in the water.

The puddle (in…say, a tire) dries out, and the Anopheles larvae die. No big deal, right? The world will go on. Those Aedes eggs are still ominously clinging to the sides, though.

The ship docks. The tires are unloaded in Florida. It rains. The tires fill up, and now those Aedes eggs hatch. And that’s the problem with controlling these mosquitoes. Their eggs are essentially indestructable and can keep for nearly half a decade. Even in areas of Texas that are prone to drought, you can still get these mosquitoes despite the fact they need water to reproduce.

And that’s the other thing about mosquitoes. They’re the Buffy Summers of water-finding.

If you’re a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, remember how she always used to find a stake wherever she needed it?

Well, mosquitoes are that way with water. They’ll breed in toys, flowerpots and Starbucks cups if given the chance. In a weird way…litter can kill. Kind of.

Anyways…the interesting thing about this virus is that it doesn’t get the mosquito sick. They actually regulate the virus’s reproduction somewhat well in their system. It enters the mosquito through a bloodmeal, infects their midgut (their esophagous and foregut is protected by a thick layer of exoskeleton) and eventually goes systemic. The virus enters the mosquito’s salivary glands and is passed through a bloodmeal.

Arthropod borne diseases are controlled through vector control. The idea is to get the vector populations down enough to make finding viremic hosts unlikely. A lot of this is done by spraying for adults, or by putting a special version of BT in water containing mosquitoes which will poke holes in their guts (same species used in corn, different strain). You can also destroy mosquito breeding grounds by keeping your devoid of any containers. Problem is, with the ability of the Aedes eggs to survive adverse conditions this makes simple mechanical control very tricky.

So if you live in Florida, slather on the DEET and clean your yard.

And it’s by Bad Religion.

Coincidence? Not really.

So y’all are familiar with the New-Age movement where any old bullshit is accepted and respected as a religion, right?

Well, some of these loonies think the world’s going to end in 2012 based only on the misinterpretation of a Mayan Calandar.

Okay…so there’s a Facebook Group called ‘Shut Up, The World Won’t End in 2012‘ which was apparently formed to criticize this belief.

Woohoo, right? Another skeptic willing to stand up to vacuous bullshit?

Well, not entirely. Here’s their latest status message:

I’d like to say that this page wasn’t created to be a debate between religion. I don’t care whether you belive in god or not, or if you believe he has anything to do with the world ending, I just don’t want this turned into religious combat. This was created based on scientific facts, no matter if there is a god or not. Good Day. (Not offensively meant, people have their right to believe what they wish to believe.)

If you look at the discussion page, it’s chock-full of religious apocalypse predictions.

I mean, I know…right? You just created a page intended to combat a widespread belief based on no evidence whatsoever. You didn’t intend this to turn into a religious debate….really!

Look…anytime you post some sort of insane mystical bullshit, you have to expect the religious to flock to it. It’s what they tend to do. When the religious get all hot and bothered over something insane, the skeptics are going to flock to it with the intention of snickering rudely. It’s what we tend to do.

If you’re willing to criticize one insane belief, you pretty much have to be willing to criticize them all. A lot of these insane beliefs tend to be coalesced around religion in one way or another, and criticizing these crazy beliefs often involves criticizing religion. If you don’t have the balls to criticize religion, you certainly don’t have the balls to criticize the many, many, many, many crazy beliefs that are somewhat or entirely religious in nature.

Welcome to the internet, idiot. Methinks someone got his toes stepped on.

A New York Times article discusses how to rig your cellphone into some damn nifty tools:

“We convert cellphones into devices that diagnose diseases,” said Aydogan Ozcan, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and member of the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, who created the devices. He has formed a company, Microskia, to commercialize the technology.

The adapted phones may be used for screening in places far from hospitals, technicians or diagnostic laboratories, Dr. Ozcan said.

In one prototype, a slide holding a finger prick of blood can be inserted over the phone’s camera sensor. The sensor detects the slide’s contents and sends the information wirelessly to a hospital or regional health center. For instance, the phones can detect the asymmetric shape of diseased blood cells or other abnormal cells, or note an increase of white blood cells, a sign of infection, he said.

Really…as an aspiring entomologist and blogger, you have no idea how frusterating it is that cellphones don’t have macrophotography abilities.

Here’s how it’s done:

For this electronic system of magnification, inexpensive light-emitting diodes added to the basic cellphone shine their light on a sample slide placed over the phone’s camera chip. Some of the light waves hit the cells suspended in the sample, scattering off the cells and interfering with the other light waves.

Basically, do you ever see small transparent circles floating in midair throughout the day? Those are red blood cells on the tops of your lenses. This *seems* to work in the same manner.

Here is the website for the company mentioned in the article. Unfortunately, it looks like it’s not up and running yet.

Hopefully, they make something for blackberries.

Well…it’s been a long road so far.

I’ve been working in a lab three days a week on top of a 17-hour credit schedule.

I’ve been applying to graduate schools.

Oh…and I totaled my car. Hit another car at 75 miles per hour. Not exactly fun. Gotta figure out how to pay for a new car now.

Other than that, just busy with applying to graduate schools. A few more formalities to take care of, and the applications will be complete.

Will this result in more bloggage?

Hopefully.

Bug Girl has a post about where to find jobs in school. It’s a great list, but I’m gonna kind of pull a Kanye here and point something out.

Jobs around campus aren’t difficult to find if you know where and how to look. However, if you have special circumstances (in my case, child support), this might not be the best option. I work in a job where I’m paid roughly $5 an hour more than most other campus job I’ve come across.

However, there’s a tradeoff here. I make enough to live on my own and afford my child support ($300/month, which I know to be incorrectly figured…which I need to get fixed but don’t have the time. Thanks, Iowa!) however, working where I do isn’t exactly the greatest experience for a biology major.

I’ve historically solved this by two ways. I actually work two jobs…one job I work about 16 hours per week, the other job I work about 4 to 6 depending on what needs to be done. I also volunteer in a few labs. It takes time away from my studies, but I still get valuable experience and I can still put it on my CV so it works out very well.

When looking for lab/volunteer work, be up front about what you want to gain and what you think you can offer the lab. Don’t be arrogant, but make it known what you want to learn or otherwise accomplish. If you’re working or volunteering in a lab, you don’t want to be washing dishes all the time (although there will inevitably be some dishwashing or micropipette tip stocking), or filing papers. You’re there to gain experience in your field and you don’t want to work in a lab that won’t help you attain that goal.

I actually gain more experience from my volunteer work than I do either of my paid jobs. I work in a phylogenetics lab and have recently started doing PCR, running electrophoresis and using phylogenetics software and I now have a few phylogenetics programs on my desktop.

It’s been a great time. So if you want experience but have some special financial circumstances, don’t feel like you necessarily need to get paid to get it. If you can’t find a job on campus, don’t feel like you can’t get experience in your field.

BT-dubs…I have more than a few friends who have landed jobs pre and post graduation which started out as volunteering in a lab.

http://entomology.ifas.ufl.edu/walker/ufbir/index.shtml

Basically every world record you could want to know about bugs is here.

Biggest? Loudest? Most fecundiferous? Most instars? Longest lived? Shortest lived?

It’s all here…and I probably spent far more time than I should have clicking around on it.

Hey, guys…looks like this graduate school thing is going to be a bit longer than I thought. Took the GREs…gonna take them again. Need to apply for graduate schools, need to take care of some legal issues, and of course wrap up all of my loose ends here in Iowa.

It’s going to be a far busier semester than I thought it was going to be in addition to all this, but I’ll at least try to keep up on some of my blogging as best as I can.

One thing that I’d like to point out is a sense of irony that has come over me now that I’m looking back on my college career.

On this blog, I’ve made kind of a huge deal about how much I loved insects, and how long I’ve loved them for. I’ve always *known* I wanted to be an entomologist, and I’ve always *known* what I was going to study in college.

So, here’s where the irony comes in. When I came into college, I wanted to study phylogenetics, taxonomy and ecology. I never much cared for chemistry or math, and figured I wouldn’t be interested in biochemistry or genetics.

Then I started reading. And reading. And reading. Four years later, I’m applying to graduate schools for molecular biology and evolutionary biology. Basically all chemistry and math.

Fun, fun.

One of the biggest things that’s made me change my mind is learning about things like RNA interference, which is shown in this video below.

RNAi is really important to vector biologists, since a lot of insect-bourne viruses are RNA viruses. RNA viruses get into the cell, make both positive and negative sense RNA. Some of this inevitably ends up binding together, making the mosquito’s immune system think to itself ‘OMG UNDAR ATTAK!’ and sets into motion the chemistry explained above.

We’re just beginning to figure out how this system works. We can inject RNA which codes for the proteins involved in the RNAi pathway and actually use the pathway to silence itself to see how viruses multiply in the cell when unrestrained by the pathway…they kill the viruses, but not enough to stop them from transmitting the virus to a host. Basically, we can use RNAi and proteins which screw with the pathway (like B2…also derived from a virus) to learn more about the pathway…and potentially use it to our own ends.

You see, not all mosquitoes are the same…even within species. Some strains of the same species are very good at transmitting viruses, while other strains of the same species simply cannot transmit the virus. If we know why this is, we could perhaps modify some of the vector mosquitoes and make them non-vectors. This is a very far ways away, though…and it might not even happen in my lifetime. I hope it does…but man, we have so very much to learn about this stuff.

It’s really interesting stuff that is essentially a type of ecology I had not known about when I entered school. It also opens your eyes and makes you think differently. In the past, I had always viewed mosquitoes and other arthropods which vectored diseases as an enemy of sorts. Now I view it sort of as a hostage situation…these animals are potentially useful to us if they help us disrupt the transmission cycle of these diseases.

Anyways…that’s my college career in a nutshell. I went from telling my adviser to get me around as much chemistry as possible, only to dive into it headfirst.

Blogging will be sparse this semester, for many reasons.

I’m in the middle of some legal proceedings…civil, not criminal. Don’t worry. Those should be wrapped up by October at the latest.

I’m also studying for the Graduate Record Exam and looking at graduate school prospects. I’m wanting to study medical entomology…diseases and insects that spread them. It’s a fascinating field that incorporates many feilds of biology. There are molecular biologists looking at how arboviruses are spread throughout various mosquito populations (mosquitoes have STDs!), evolutionary biologists looking at how disease vectors react to human encroachment, and of course, there are entomologists studying pesticides that could possibly be used for vector control.

It’s also very important. It’s a well known fact that malaria has essentially re-written what it means to be human by changing the course of our evolution via sickle-cell anemia and a few other disorders. Yellow fever was also responsible for temporarily stopping construction of the panama canal. They’re also a problem here in America.

I have half a dozen prospects, all of which I’m excited about. I’d like to devote my time to keeping up my GPA, studying for the GRE tests I need to take, reviewing applications and sweet-talking instructors into giving me glowing recommendation letters.

My lifelong wish of being a scientist seems to be coming true, and this is a critical time for me. I want to thank you, my readers for being curious about my passion and for reading this blog to satisfy your curiosity. I’ll end my hiatus sometime around December.

In the meantime, I’ll be adding links and changing various things on the site. I’ll still be checking Cheshire.entomoblog@gmail.com, so if you want to contact me…that’s the place to do it.

Again…thanks to everyone who’s read this and made this worth doing.