Now Frankenstein can have a pet jellyfish. A team of scientists has taken the heart cells of a rat, arranged them on a piece of rubbery silicone, added a jolt of electricity, and created a "Franken-jelly." Just like a real jellyfish, the artificial jelly swims around by pumping water in and out of its bell-shaped body. Researchers hope the advance can someday help engineers design better artificial hearts and other muscular organs.

Young moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita), which are usually between 10 and 12 cm wide, swim rhythmically. First, they flex their muscles quickly and all at once, expelling water as they take on a dome shape. Then, slowly, their body relaxes and flattens, triggering another round of muscle contractions. Researchers knew which cells helped jellyfish move, and how they work together to push and pull water. What they wanted to find out was how best to recreate this behavior using materials available in the lab.

Bioengineers John Dabiri from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, and Kevin Kit Parker from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University adopted a motto: Copy nature, but not too much. "Some engineers build things out of concrete, copper and steel—we build things out of cells," says Parker.

The duo and their colleagues stenciled out the ideal jellyfish shape on silicone, a material that would be sturdy but flexible, much like the jellyfish itself. They then coached rat muscle cells to grow in parallel bands on the silicone and encased the cells with a stretchy material called elastomer. To get their artificial jellyfish, or medusoid, swimming, the researchers submerged it in a salty solution and ran an electric current through the water, jump-starting the rat cells. The mimic propelled itself rapidly in the water, swimming as effectively as a real jellyfish, the researchers report online today in Nature Biotechnology.

The team went through a lot of trial and error to get everything right, Parker notes. The silicone layer used to mimic the jellyfish's body had to be strong but not so strong that the muscle cells could not stiffen it, and the fingerlike lobes of the body had to be adjusted to make sure water could flow in between them. In healthy hearts, valves open wide and close tightly. When they malfunction, there can be serious health repercussions. By studying how jellyfish manipulate liquids with their body, Parker says, scientists may be able to come up with more accurate ways to fix or even replace damaged heart valves.

Joseph Ayers, a neurophysiologist at Northeastern University in Boston who was not involved with the study, is impressed, particularly because the researchers were able to use the energy produced by muscle cells and not batteries to power the medusoids, making them practically independent. "This is very much a landmark paper," he says. "I think in the long run, its greatest impact is going to be in implantable medical devices."

Publised by AAAS Science

*This item has been corrected on 24 July. A team of scientists has taken the heart cells of a rat, arranged them on a piece of rubbery silicone, not silicon, to mimic a jellyfish.

Imagine feeling like you’re lifting a 50-kilogram weight just by pulling at thin air. That’s just one of the possible applications of new "smart fingertips" created by a team of nanoengineers. The electronic fingers mold to the shape of the hand, and so far the researchers have shown that they can transmit electric signals to the skin. The team hopes to one day incorporate the devices into a smart glove that creates virtual sensations, fooling the brain into feeling everything from texture to temperature.

Scientists have already developed circuits that stimulate our sense of touch. Some are used in Braille readers that allow blind people to browse the Internet. The devices work by sending electric currents to receptors in the skin, which interpret them as real sensations. However, most of these circuits are built on flat, rigid surfaces that can’t bend, stretch, or fold, says Darren Lipomi, a nanoengineer at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the new study.

Hoping to create circuits with the flexibility of skin, materials scientist John Rogers of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and colleagues cut up nanometer-sized strips of silicon; implanted thin, wavy strips of gold to conduct electricity; and mounted the entire circuit in a stretchable, spider web-type mesh of polymer as a support. They then embedded the circuit-polyimide structure onto a hollow tube of silicone that had been fashioned in the shape of a finger. Just like turning a sock inside out, the researchers flipped the structure so that the circuit, which was once on the outside of the tube, was on the inside where it could touch a finger placed against it.

To test the electronic fingers, the researchers put them on and pressed flat objects, such as the top of their desks. The pressure created electric currents that were transferred to the skin, which the researchers felt as mild tingling. That’s a first step in creating electrical signals that could be sent to the fingers, which could virtually recreate sensations such as heat, pressure, and texture, the team reports online today in Nanotechnology.

The work is "a striking achievement," Lipomi says, who notes that the device could have lots of applications. "In a virtual world, a trainee could perform virtual surgery, in which the devices were used to trick the trainee’s brain into believing they were actually performing a delicate task."

Rogers says another application of the technology is to custom fit the "electronic skin" around entire organs, allowing doctors to remotely monitor changes in temperature and blood flow. Electronic skin could also restore sensation to people who have lost their natural skin, he says, such as burn victims or amputees.

Think of it as Liquid-Plumr for the circulatory system. Researchers have designed a clump of tiny particles that rides the current of the bloodstream, seeks out life-threatening blood clots, and obliterates them. The approach works in mice and could soon move on to human trials.

Blood clots are bad news for the brain, heart, and other organs. These masses of blood cells can grow big enough to choke off veins and arteries, preventing oxygen from flowing to critical organs. One of the chief obstacles to dealing with blood clots is finding where they have lodged in the body. Even if doctors locate clots, they're hard to get rid of. Doctors often prescribe blood thinners that slow down the time it takes a clot to form, but such medication can also cause excessive bleeding. Another method is stenting, a procedure in which a flexible wire or tube is used to reopen a vessel. Patients recover quickly but often spend at least 1 night in the hospital.

Looking for a better approach, biomedical engineer Donald Ingber of Harvard University and colleagues turned to nanoparticles. Modeled after platelets—cells that circulate in the blood and help stop bleeding by forming clots—the nanoparticles are less than 100 nm wide and made of synthetic polymers stuck together like a ball of wet sand. Like platelets, clumps of the particles flow freely in the blood and gravitate toward blocked vessels by sensing a change in blood flow. Once there, they break apart into individual particles that stick to the clot, releasing a drug called tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) that dissolves it.

The researchers tested the approach on mice suffering from blood clots. After they injected the particles into the animals, the particles coated in tPA were able to reopen the blocked vessels quickly, despite harboring low dosages of medicine, the team reports online today in Science. None of the mice had uncontrolled bleeding, and because the particles are biodegradable, they are eventually broken down by the body.

"Making these particles so that they break apart at the right amount of force was a challenge," says Ingber. "The most exciting thing that we are able to do is deliver a clot-busting drug directly to a site where a clot is, without knowing where it is." He says that the particles could be used to deliver essentially any drug—an anti-inflammatory to a specific spot where inflammation was occurring, for example.

"The beauty of these nanoparticles is that they will not deliver this drug to any other place but the area of stress," says Heyu Ni, platelet biologist at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, Canada, specifically referring to blood clot sites. Another advantage of the approach, he says, is that it gets around the issue of estimating the amount of anticlotting medication to give a patient. High dosages are effective but could cause excessive bleeding, whereas small doses are much safer but may not get the job done. The nanoparticles skirt this problem by depositing a small amount of medication directly on the clot. He notes that the nanoparticles could be used as a diagnostic tool to seek out blockages that may need to be removed surgically, since places where the nanoparticles wind up are easier to spot with ultrasound. "This could change our concept of how to deliver drugs effectively. I would think of this study as possibly revolutionary."

Once upon a time, Asian carp were a solution, not a problem. Voracious filter feeders, the fish happily gobbled up poop, and so were introduced into sewage-treatment plants in the American South to clean retention ponds. It seemed like a fine idea until flooding at an Arkansas hatchery provided the perfect opportunity for a great escape. The fish made their way into the Mississippi, Missouri and Illinois River systems, crowding out native fish wherever they went. And now the carp has really hit the fan — they’re nearing the largest group of freshwater lakes on the planet, and no one is sure how to stop them.

The Great Lakes support a $7 billion dollar fishing industry now under direct threat from the carp, which eat too much, reproduce too quickly, grow too fast and live too long — up to 25 years. Experts sketch a nightmare scenario in which the carp could eventually eliminate most other fish species from the Great Lakes, which is why a host of agencies and researchers are urgently searching for ways to slow them down. Their ideas range from the conventional (paying bounties to fishermen) to the downright weird (water guns that shoot bubbles), and from the scary (poison particles and electric barriers) to the potentially tasty (eating carp into submission).

Some of those ideas are in a 232-page report released earlier this year by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers detailing an $18 billion plan to keep out invasive carp, along with 11 other Great Lake threats such as invasive zebra mussels. But that plan would take decades to implement, and no one knows where the money will come from — or whether it will succeed at keeping the carp out.

“This is a big deal,” says James Garvey, a fish ecologist and professor at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. “We’ve connected watersheds that were not connected before. Now species have a pathway between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi.”

Of the four Asian carp species in U.S. waters, only two can be held culpable for ecological destruction. Outside of the retention ponds they were expected to keep clean, bighead carp (Hypophthalmichthys nobilis) and silver carp (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix) are the ones we label invasive, and their all-you-can-eat-buffet mentality leaves little for other organisms to feed on.

Asian carp even present a direct physical threat to humans because of their extraordinary jumping ability. When the fish are spooked by the noise that boat motors make, their knee-jerk reaction is to hurl upward and out of the water. This might not be so bad if it were just one or two fish making the leap, but Asian carp are both individually large — with some growing up to 110 pounds — and they travel in massive groups, and what makes one fish jump will make dozens of others nearby do the same — sometimes bonking nearby boats, and researchers. “They jump into the boat, they break things and now we actually have nets around the boats to keep us from getting hurt,” says Duane Chapman, a fish biologist who heads the Asian carp research program at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

To keep track of the number of carp swimming around, the USGS routinely captures a sample of fishfrom about six different sites along the Mississippi river system. In 1991, the number of silver carp in a single sample increased from one to 102 at a single site.

Native filter feeders such as paddlefish, gizzard shad and big mouth buffalo face major competition for scoring a meal of rotifers and other plankton.

So far, control efforts have focused on a tried and true method: fishermen. At Southern Illinois, Garvey and his team found that using contracted anglers to harvest the carp helped temporarily, but that the fish replenished themselves easily. “Fishing them is technology that is here now; it already exists,” he says.

The USGS, meanwhile, is thinking outside the box by trying to develop innovative technologies that could really get under the skin of Asian carp. One project looks at using water guns that shoot air,creating bubbles that cause turbulence, annoying and deterring the fish from moving into a new region — a bubble barrier. Another research group at USGS hopes to design a poison particle that only carp can digest. The poison is mixed in with compounds that can only be broken down by trypsin, an enzyme that is abundant in carp. Both methods are currently being tested in the lab.

“We hope we can develop these tools and switch them over for use on other aquatics,” says Cynthia Kolar, a fish biologist and science adviser at USGS. Kolar says that Asian carp have been in American rivers for more than 30 years. “There will be no silver bullet solution,” she adds.

One idea that’s already being tested is an electric barrier erected more than a decade ago near Chicago. The barrier emits an electrical current that only fish can detect. The bigger the fish are, the more uncomfortable the gradient makes them feel. A key issue with relying on electricity, though, is figuring out what to do if the power ever goes out. There is also concern that the barrier, designed to keep Asian carp out of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, allows the fish to get by when ships pass through. Research by the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers also found that large passing ships could cause the electric field to fluctuate.

Garvey thinks that a smart approach to the carp issue would be to give them a predator. That could be fishermen plucking them from the water, perhaps incentivized by tweaking American appetites. “They are an excellent source of protein and to be honest, quite tasty,” says Garvey.

In Asia, carp are eaten and enjoyed, despite being bony, which has helped keep populations low. Like Garvey, Chick enjoys the taste of carp but understands that the bones make it a hard sell to Western tastes. “People want their fish in a square patty between two buns. They want to be able to put the whole fish in their mouth in one bite,” he says.

Chapman, of the USGS, warns that if the carp population keeps booming, the fish’s food resources will inevitably decline, which could make future generations of carp less fleshy — and tasty — than they are now. Part of the solution, he says, is to start eating more carp now.

Food stops, like Dirk’s Fish and Gourmet Shop in Chicago, are making small steps toward adjusting American palates to Asian carp by serving the fish as a delightfully seasoned burger. In 2009, the USGS and other agencies posted three-part video series on YouTube, called “Flying Fish, Great Dish,” that focused on preparing carp to eat. Chapman was the chef behind the counter.

Beyond carp burgers and filets, there are other uses for carp such as in fertilizer, fish meal and fish oil. But so far, these markets haven’t been tapped, and Chick and Garvey agree that marketing efforts need to improve. What’s needed, Chick and other experts say, is an intensified, multipronged plan of attack to prevent a carp breakthrough into the Great Lakes. “Step one will be just keeping them from going anywhere else,” he says. “There isn’t going to be one simple answer, but it’s worth our efforts.”

Originally Published on Scienceline

In a university lab on the Upper East Side of Manhattan is a suburb where only rodents live. Plastic containers line the wall of a room like little boxes made of ticky-tacky — little boxes all the same. Several times a day, Amber Alliger, a petite woman with dark brown hair and eyes, goes on neighborhood watch.

Alliger makes the rounds to ensure that all the furry residents are living according to the rules of her experiment.

Alliger is a behavioral neuroscientist at the City University of New York’s Hunter College. For her latest research, she places a rat at one end of a star shaped metal platform, hides a bit of maple flavored oatmeal at another and observes how well the rat uses its memory to find the treat. She is studying the development of the rat’s brain cells, hormones and muscles, and aims to demonstrate that rats living under uniform laboratory conditions show reduced development. Alliger hopes to establish a set of guidelines to keep experimental rats in an environment where they are constantly stimulated and challenged to use their brains in different ways, duplicating the kind of variety that humans experience.

“Every human does not exercise, eat the same food or live in the exact same environment,” says Alliger. She explains that sometimes the success of an experiment is defined by “internal validity” in the data. This comes from lab work that is produced by running an experiment repeatedly on the same kind of test subject. It will often produce very strong and compelling results, the kind that a careful scientist is after. But when these data are used to create a drug for a diverse human population, the results can be disappointing. The data’s “external validity,” or applicability outside the lab, often plummets. “I’m not surprised that there are pharmaceutical companies facing multimillion-dollar lawsuits because of bad data,” she adds.

Alliger believes that experimental rats need variety just as humans do. “They are smart, social and inquisitive, just like us. So forget the barren environments where they can’t use any of the muscles and hormones and neurotransmitters that make them such great models.”

To protect these unique test subjects, Alliger suggests “enrichment protocols.” “Exercise changes the brain the most,” she says. “If you stress an animal and give it exercise, they do better the second time.” Rats can be enriched environmentally, for example by placing a spin wheel in their cages, or socially, by allowing them to live with other rodents. Regardless of the approach, Alliger believes researchers need to consider keeping their test subjects engaged in their own daily lives.

Alliger has a dedicated research team and colleagues that share her viewpoint.

“We love rats here!” says Sarrana Belgrave, another behavioral neuroscientist at CUNY. Belgrave, who has known Alliger for 10 years, recalls her favorite anecdote about her colleague. “Amber was wearing a bright yellow SpongeBob T-shirt, holding a rat and just smiling. She is the epitome of the creepy scientist girl that lets rats crawl all over her,” she adds fondly.

Alliger, 45, readily admits that although she was always interested, she came somewhat late to science. In high school, she was far from being the star science student. Although interested in the subject, she says, “Science used to scare the crap out of me.” As an undergraduate at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, Alliger studied photography. She then enrolled in the Parsons School of Design in New York City, where she took up advertising. Alliger didn’t like having her creativity “controlled by clients,” so she decided at last to follow her interest in science.

She went back to undergraduate school for a third time, this time at Hunter College, where she majored in neuroscience. Alliger continued her graduate studies in animal behavior. Peter Moller, a behavioral scientist at Hunter College and Alliger’s graduate adviser, describes her as a scientist with “unbounding curiosity and uncompromising work habits.” He says she cares deeply about the welfare of the animals she is working with. “Amber is always concerned about the health of her research subjects. Her dictum is ‘unhealthy animals yield flawed science.’”

While a student at Hunter, Alliger served as a representative on the college’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC). She reviewed applications submitted by the university’s researchers wanting to use animals as part of their study. IACUC makes sure animals are treated humanely and that the highest ethical and scientific standards are maintained throughout an experiment. Alliger noticed that some researchers were using their test subjects in illogical ways for instance, using a blind rat on a maze designed to test for vision. “That’s when I decided, here’s what I want to do: I want to better the science,” says Alliger.

But Alliger never lets her devotion to the welfare of her subjects get in the way of improving her scientific method. In fact, it’s the science that drives her.

After running a variety of memory tests on them, she will have to study their brains to get an accurate idea of how their development has been affected. This means killing the rat and removing the brain from its head. She can sacrifice her scaly-tailed residents in the name of science, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t difficult for her.

“If I can take out just a few brains and use them to show that all animals should be enriched, that it’s important, I think it will be worth it,” she says.

It’s not uncommon for researchers to give names to their test subjects, but for the memory experiment, Alliger has simply numbered them 36 to 48.

As she speaks, number 45 rustles in his box, pointing his sniffing nose toward the top of the cage. Soon, his brain will be removed, and studied. It becomes abundantly clear why, in her lab, Alliger prefers not to give them names — only numbers.

I was six years old when Dr. Seuss introduced me to the green eggs and ham salesman, and I wanted those eggs way before he offered to serve them on a boat and with a goat.

Now that I’m older, I realize that Sam-I-am was quite an honest salesman. He didn’t have to say that his food might have been genetically modified. It was green, so even at six, I knew it was “different”.

Nowadays, I might be a bit hesitant to down a plate of off color meat, but I commend any manufacturer of genetically modified food that is willing to be as bold as Sam—making their products distinguishable by colour. That way, anyone who would prefer not to have them here, nor there, nor anywhere, can easily make that choice. Scientists at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, United Kingdom have created an odd prototype for what the future of labeling might look like. Their product: a purple tomato that is as rich in nutrients as blueberries. The researchers borrowed a few genes from a snapdragon and mixed them with the genes of a tomato. A few days later, hanging from a vine was a hybrid fruit that, from the right angle, could be mistaken for a gigantic blueberry. While the scientists’ main goal was to make products like ketchup more nutritional without the added cost, they have also achieved clear labeling of a product that has been painted by deep strokes of science. The purple tomatoes are rich in anthocyanin, the compound that gives blueberries their deep hue and is thought to offer protection against certain cancers and cardiovascular diseases.

Genetic modification can be a powerful tool when it comes to food production. It has the potential to help us get around food allergies without sacrificing nutrients, attack pests without harmful pesticides, and purchase fruits and vegetables that can live in the fridge for weeks at a time. Though the idea of a green pepper that doesn’t wilt for six months might be hard for some to swallow, the choice to eat that green pepper or walk right by it on a shelf should be yours.

Researchers in the US have taken more of a Uncle Sam-said- it’s-ok approach to genetically modified fruits. Once the FDA has approved a food item for consumption, American retailers are not required to label it as genetically modified. Almost all papayas imported from Hawaii have been tinkered with to prevent pests. However, you’ll likely never find a sign that says “these have been tweaked” nestled atop a papaya pyramid in any food market.

You have a better chance of finding out if your produce has been genetically modified, if you squint at its price look up (PLU) code. PLU codes are printed on the fruit and vegetable stickers that can be a nuisance to remove. They are meant to tell the cashier how much to charge us for the produce but can also communicate whether a fruit or veggie is genetically modified, organically grown or produced with chemical fertilizers or pesticides. If something is genetically modified, there are five numbers in the code and the first number will be an eight. At least that’s what the inventors of the system, officials at the International Federation for produce standards, are hoping for. The system is less reliable in the US because it is optional for manufacturers to label their products accordingly.

Orange grapes may appear alien next to the white or purple ones we are accustomed to but if they have been modified to provide protein then researchers should stake their bets on appealing to a vegetarian clientele. Let the modified things look modified, just as modified as perhaps green eggs and ham (there’s nothing natural about tofurky, after all).

Being up front and allowing the customer a chance to evaluate their true options is a much better approach than hoping they won’t question the lack of seeds in their orange simply because it looks like the other oranges. Eventually, someone is going to want to taste those odd colored grapes, or perhaps even put those purple tomatoes on top of a salad.

Published on Scienceline

You’ve lathered. Rinsed. Repeated. Now, it’s time to condition. With steam rising, you massage the slippery, sweet-smelling conditioner onto your hair, and in the three to five minutes it takes to work, you may find yourself asking, “How exactly does this stuff transform my hair into a stockpile of silkiness?”

The answer is that a certain opposites-attract chemistry is going on between your hair and your conditioner.

Every day, your cascading locks weather a series of storms. One day it might be a run-in with a flat iron, another could bring vicious winds from a blow dryer. The result: hair – once shiny and smooth – is now frizzy, clumped and yearning for repair.

To understand the chemical romance that starts the moment you “generously spread the conditioner from root to tip” (as the bottle instructs us), you have to understand the structure of hair.

Under the microscope, hair strands are flaky-looking. These “flakes” are dead skin cells overlapping to form a cuticle layer that protects the fragile inner layers of a hair strand. Light reflects off this cuticle layer, giving hair its natural shine. The average person has between 120,000-150,000 hair strands and they look their best when the overlying cuticle flakes lay tightly against one another. When hair begins to look frizzy or limp, it means the cuticle layer is being worn down and the overlapping cells are no longer lying snugly flat.

“Imagine frayed rope,” says Robert Lochhead, a polymer scientist at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. Lochhead is also a consultant for several companies that make cosmetic and personal care products. He explains that on a molecular level, the invisible bonds that hold the cuticle cells together weaken over time. Cells become more and more loose and snag against cuticle flakes of other strands. The individual hair strands then tangle and sometimes break off. This change in the way our hair looks and feels is often the first reminder that it may be time to reach for the conditioner.

Hair conditioner is made of only a few ingredients but it’s the cationic surfactants that do most of the work. At one end of every cationic surfactant molecule is a positive charge that binds to the negative charge of a hair strand. The attraction is so strong that the surfactants completely surround the strand and cover the cuticle flakes, like a customized hair envelope. The small amount of acid in the conditioner makes the cuticle flakes fall tightly against each other and hair feels smooth again, even after you rinse the conditioner out.

If you’re a fan of the two-in-one conditioning shampoos, your desire to be efficient is an opportunity for even more science atop your head.

Lochhead is a pioneer in this arena. In fact, the concept of washing and conditioning your hair at the same time is called the “Lochhead Effect.” In a two-in-one product, he explains, the catatonic surfactants remain suspended in all the suds while the shampoo is working to break down oils and dirt. Then, when you rinse the shampoo out, the surfactants are “triggered” by the water to bind to the hair, while only the dirt and oil washes away. Surfactants can also convey other cuticle-protecting substances, such as silicone, to the hair.

“When you think of silicone, think of oil droplets in water,” explains Ali Dhinojwala, a chemist at the University of Akron who is trying to figure out optimal ways of delivering silicone to hair. “A lot is actually lost during rinsing. It’s hit and miss, and that is what we are trying to figure out.” He says that the solution right now is to add a lot of silicone so that a fair amount will bind to the hair.

Call it a bit of shower-time chemistry. Whether you carry two bottles into the shower, or prefer a two-in-one kind of deal, the science is at your fingertips.

Published by Scienceline

On Aug. 30, 2009, Mila De Mier, a realtor from Key West, Fla., stopped at a Staples in Washington, D.C. and printed all 3,766 pages of a petition intended for the Food and Drug Administration. At noon she was in the FDA’s Dockets Management offices, handing over the document and its attached 112,000 signatures. De Mier had travelled from Key West to the nation’s capitol and didn’t want her work to get lost in the shuffle.

Two weeks later, she called the FDA to check on the petition’s status. De Mier was told that its label, “Say NO to genetically modified mosquitoes,” made her package look suspicious. It was sent to security because they worried it actually contained genetically modified mosquitoes. When it was cleared, security shredded the entire document. So De Mier reprinted all 3,766 pages, travelled back to D.C. and submitted the whole thing again.

De Mier is worried about a plan — supported by the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District — to use genetically modified male mosquitoes to decrease population of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes responsible for transmitting dengue fever.

The virus that causes dengue fever is a hitchhiker that makes its way from humans to mosquitoes and back to humans again. The cycle is sustained by the Aedes aegypti female, who feeds on human blood to provide nutrients for her offspring. Her unsuspecting bite, if ridden with the dengue virus, results in headaches, aching joints and a rash. Dengue had not been seen in Key West since 1934. But between 2009 and 2011, there were 92 cases of the infectious disease, reminding residents that life in the tropics can come with a bite.

Currently, there is no dengue in the Florida Keys, but that war wasn’t easy to win. The outbreak in 2009 prompted health officials to use everything in their arsenal. The inspectors used helicopters to spray the island with an ecologically-friendly mosquito-killing liquid, marched door-to-door overturning open containers and handed out fliers and DVDs teaching residents how to prevent their homes from becoming a mosquito breeding haven.

“I don’t think anyone else in the world did all that we did,” says Coleen Fitzsimmons, a biologist at the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District. She credits the fact that there is no dengue in the Keys to this extensive and time consuming effort but says the number of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes flying around is still as high as it was in 2009, and that could result in a whole new outbreak. Even though the District killed the dengue-carrying population, Aedes aegypti mosquitoes continually migrate to the Keys, and this keeps the population strong.

Fitzsimmons wants to plan ahead and lean less on a chemical approach to fighting dengue: “With the Environmental Protection Agency limiting the amount of products we can use to kill mosquitoes, we are continuously working with a limited number of materials, and mosquitoes become resistant to the products.” Luke Alphey, co-founder of the Oxitec research company, has invented a method providing just the alternative Fitzsimmons and her colleagues are seeking. His idea is to prevent dengue fever by collapsing the Aedes aegypti population of mosquitoes that spread it. “It’s been called birth control for mosquitoes,” says Alphey.

Without any current cases of dengue, De Mier believes it more responsible to wait for peer-reviewed literature before implementing the Oxitec technology. “I’d like to make one thing clear,” says De Mier. “I am not anti-science.” She recalls that in 2010, when the technology was first presented to the residents, it was called “sterile male release,” and nothing was said about the insects being genetically modified. De Mier thinks that Oxitec is interested in testing its product in the U.S. to establish credibility, allowing them to market their product to even more countries.

De Mier and Key West residents aren’t the only ones expressing doubt. Phil Lounibos, an ecologist and mosquito behavior expert at the University of Florida in Gainesville, worries that there isn’t enough evidence to prove that they will stop or prevent dengue from resurfacing. “There is only a loose correlation between a reduced number of mosquitoes and a reduced number of dengue cases,” he adds. His reasoning points to Singapore, a country in which the government heavily regulates mosquito control to keep the Aedes aegypti population low. Despite low numbers of the mosquitoes, cases of dengue continue to pop up in Singapore.

Oxitec’s genetically modified mosquitoes have already been tested in Malaysia, Brazil and the Cayman Islands. “We are extremely careful about considerations concerning human health and well-being,” says Alphey, “and even if we weren’t, the regulators would make us consider these things.” He explains that the tool is species-specific — only affecting the Aedes aegypti population — making it “quite eco-friendly.” It is the kind of tool useful for a farmer getting rid of one pest without affecting any other organisms beneficial to his crop. Results of Oxitec’s trials have been published in Nature Biotechnology.

For Lounibos, the data from the previous research suggests that social variables are also involved. He says, “The results from experimental trials that Oxitec completed in Malaysia and the Cayman Islands are not particularly strong, although that may be related to a lack of community involvement at these sites.” On the other hand, Lounibos thinks Oxitec’s recent success in Brazil is the result of a stronger effort to engage that community. He recognizes that Oxitec faces a huge challenge in Florida where “resistance to [genetic modification] is pretty strong.”

The Florida Keys Mosquito Control District hired Michael Cobb, a social scientist at North Carolina State, to survey the public opinion. He was struck by the success of De Mier’s petition campaign, noting that, “If there are only 20,000 or so residents in Key West, Florida, why did so many persons, supposedly outside of the community, seem concerned with the cause?” Cobb’s survey of 800 people showed that while 61 percent of the participants supported the District’s use of genetically modified mosquitoes, only 18 percent opposed it, and 21 percent felt neutral toward the matter.

Perhaps public opinion cannot be captured by a singular petition or survey. Tamara Laine, a film documentarian from New Jersey, travelled to Key West in 2011 hoping to capture both sides of the story. “It’s very polarizing,” she says. “It feels like people are either for it because they think it is perfect technology, or they are extremely against it because they think there are unknown repercussions.”

Gregory Lanzaro, a vector biologist at University of California, Davis thinks opposition to using genetically modified mosquitoes comes from a general distrust of having scientists tinker around with nature. He believes the Oxitec method is “a good technology” than can improve human health, and reduce the impact insecticides can have on the environment. He says the specificity of the tool is what makes it so harmless. “This is a system that is incorporated into a genome, the only way it will move from one organism to another is through mating and you aren’t going to get a mosquito mating with a grasshopper.”

Scott Weaver, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, also believes that Oxitec’s technology is worthwhile. He says, “One of the main problems with dengue research is there are no animals, even non-human primates or monkeys that respond the way humans do to the virus. This makes it very difficult to test vaccines.” A recent dengue vaccine study in Thailand showed promising results in animals but in the human testing trials proved ineffective for providing protection against a strain of the disease. Weaver cautions that simply reducing the number of mosquitoes is not enough. He thinks emphasis should be placed on choosing the right release site so that the mosquitoes that are actually carrying the viruses are killed.

Mila De Mier’s petition sits in a government office in D.C. — a neat, hand-delivered pile of opposition. Beside it might sit the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District’s request, sent in 2011, to release the genetically modified Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, a push to explore new science. The two together — an interface of science and society.

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Perhaps it’s time to reinvent the wheel. Seeking improved safety, a Florida engineer wants to nix the standard round steering wheel and replace it with a rectangular device that turns only 90 degrees in either direction. The design takes a “hands firmly planted” approach, eliminating the need for the hand-over-hand maneuver typically used to make sharp turns. This could help drivers maintain constant control of a vehicle even at high speeds, which could mean fewer crashes.

At the annual meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society held last month, Rene Guerster, an engineer at the University of Central Florida, presented his idea as a formal proposal.

“I learned to drive a farm truck when I was nine,” Guerster explains. “That’s where my fascination with steering began.” The problem with steering, he believes, is that it isn’t intuitive. So everyone has their own way of doing it.

Looking for a better approach, Guerster included up-to-date safety technology, including steer-by-wireand anti-lock-braking, into his design. Steer-by-wire uses a computer in the car to help the steering wheel control the front tires. The computer reads the driver’s turning motion and, based on the vehicle’s speed, calculates a safe turning angle for the front wheels. Meanwhile, the anti-lock-braking technology lets a driver maneuver to avoid objects even while coming to a screeching halt. Guerster hopes to maximize the effectiveness of these technologies by hitching them to his own device.

Guerster has mockups of his design but he has never actually used it to drive—at least, not yet. He hopes to begin tests within the next year, and is planning to conduct a study in which participants of different ages, genders and levels of driving experience could try the device. Participants would be tested in three scenarios: driving along a straight road at a constant speed of 60 miles per hour, a winding road at 45 miles per hour, and making a sudden lane change at 30 miles per hour.

To integrate the steer-by-wire system effectively, Guerster will have to make sure the steering device is in perfect sync with the front wheels so that a big turn of the wheel will mean a big turn of the tires, and vice versa. To make sure the steering device is responsive without being too sensitive, he plans to test three algorithms—calculations programmed to tell the car’s computer what to do—that correspond to different levels of turning sensitivity.

Steering wheels have gone through the motions for more than a century. Originally called helms, they were used to steer boats before they first appeared in French automobiles. From there, they were incorporated into American cars by Henry Ford starting in 1908 and have been the standard ever since.

Any attempt to radically alter a design that has been so deeply entrenched for so long faces huge obstacles – including making sure that untrained drivers can use it without fear.

“The device can be made from the same materials as a regular [steering] wheel”, says Guerster, who has already applied for a patent. “The real cost is in developing the microprocessor and doing the testing to satisfy” federal regulators.

Engineers uninvolved in the project say Guerster has a long road ahead of him, but that his idea is worth exploring. Daniel Hannon, a human factors engineer at Tufts University in Massachusetts, worries that the three-and-nine o’clock hand position Geurster advocates may get uncomfortable on longer trips, leading to safety issues. “I would want the researcher to include some kind of analysis on the comfort of the driver while using the device,” Hannon says.

Richard Ferraro, a cognitive scientist at the University of North Dakota, was present at the conference on 4 October in San Diego where Guerster presented. He suggests introducing the tool gradually and giving drivers an option. “For a truck driver on a long stretch of road, I could see a tool like this being very useful. But if you are headed out for a bottle of milk, maybe you don’t need it as much,” he said.

Ferraro adds that today’s drivers are accustomed to changing technology. As a kid, he recalls televisions having three channels, getting up to change the dial and being perfectly happy with that. “Then there was the introduction of satellite TV, remote controls, and suddenly you didn’t need to get up,” says Ferraro. “People had trouble at first, but they adapted and now it’s common. I think the same would be true for this new device.”

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