Attack Of The Germs!

No one likes being sick, especially with the flu. The body aches, the fevers, and the congestion all leave us desperate for ways to end the misery. Indeed, it’s growing increasingly hard to ignore the commercials telling us to stock up on flu-fighting products, like disinfectants and hand sanitizers. But how much do these items really help you avoid becoming the flu’s next victim, and do they have other consequences that we should be aware of?

Let’s first take a look at how many of the popular disinfectants work. Cleaners like Lysol have different types of salts in them that kill germs by disrupting important protein interactions, which causes the pathogen to stop functioning normally. These salts can also work by breaking up the membrane that surrounds bacteria and some viruses, essentially breaking open the pathogen and causing everything inside it to leak out. In both of these cases, the germs stop growing or are killed altogether.

Alcohol-based hand sanitizers work in a similar manner. At concentrations of at least 60%, ethyl alcohol (or ethanol) is effective at killing some viruses, including influenza viruses. Ethanol works by changing the shape of proteins, and therefore interferes with their ability to properly interact with other proteins. Ethanol can also disrupt membranes.

 

Image of Influenza virus from the CDC highlighting proteins on the outer surface that help the virus infect cells, and the viral genome located inside.

While killing off the germs that can make us sick sounds like a good way to stay healthy, the problem with using disinfectants and sanitizers to do this is that these products kill nearly all of the microbes in our environment. While there are many microbes that make us sick, there are also many that we need to help keep us healthy. If we kill those microbes off too, then we may put ourselves at risk for developing other health problems. 

On and within our bodies live millions and millions of good microbes that do things from helping us digest food, to helping keep bad microbes out of our bodies. These good microbes encompass the population known as the microbiome. The microbiome populations shift depending on the location of the body. For example, we have good bacteria that live on our skin, the population of which differs from the population of good bacteria that live in our digestive tracts. There is increasing interest in exploring the functions of the different microbiome populations, and many studies are showing that the microbiome has important roles in keeping us healthy. For example, it is thought that irregularities in the gut microbiome population may have a role in some inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. It is possible that killing off the beneficial microbes in and on our bodies counteracts any good effect from killing off germs.

 

Keeping our good microbes around is only part of the story. According to the CDC, we are currently on the brink of a public health crisis due to the increasing numbers of microbes that are becoming resistant to common antibiotics. Due to our overuse and misuse of antibiotics, we have created strains of bacteria that are no longer susceptible, or able to be killed, by standard treatments. As bacteria populations are constantly exposed to antibiotics, many of those bacteria will be killed because they are sensitive to the antibiotic, but there will be some that are naturally able to withstand the actions of the antibiotic. Eventually, the population of bacteria that was initially a mix of sensitive and resistant will transition to a population of bacteria that is completely resistant, as all of the susceptible bacteria are killed off. What is the impact on us? In 2013, the CDC reported that at least 2 million people in the United States become infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and that at least 23,000 of these people die from their infections.

Perhaps the most well-known case is MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Staph bacteria are common and normally cause minor skin infections; however, MRSA has been highlighted in the media several times over recent years due to the outbreaks of invasive infections it has caused due to its resistance to standard antibiotics. MRSA is but one example of the bacterial strains that develop resistance to antibiotics due to constant exposure to them.

As we continue the cycle of overuse and misuse of antibiotics, we eventually will find ourselves at a point where no antibiotics will be effective against bacterial pathogens. Many public health experts suspect that point is near. There is reason to believe that constant use of disinfectants will eventually lead to the development of germs that are resistant to those disinfectants, just as we see happening with bacteria and antibiotics.

So how do we keep ourselves healthy without potentially setting ourselves up for other health problems later? We can start by limiting our use of disinfectants, and go back to simpler, tried-and-true methods of preventing the spread of communicable diseases. Despite the popularity of disinfectants and hand sanitizers, the CDC still maintains that hand-washing is one of the best ways to avoid spreading and catching viral and bacterial infections from others. Wash your hands before you eat, and avoid touching your hands to your eyes and nose.  If you are sick, do your best to sneeze or cough into the crook of your elbow (i.e., do the “Dracula sneeze”) rather than into your hands, and wash your hands frequently to avoid spreading your germs to others.

 

Of course, use soap that does not contain antimicrobial additives, like triclosan, to avoid encouraging the development of strains resistant to this compound. Soap is a potent killer of germs all by itself - it does not need supplemental antibiotics. While some companies are moving away from including triclosan, it is still present in many products, so be sure to check your labels.

Disinfectants have their place; they’re good for cleaning up food preparation areas that have come into contact with raw meat, for example. And, in times when you’re without clean water and soap, hand sanitizer can be a great tool for keeping your hands clean. But as with most things in life, these items should be used with care and arguably in balance with other washing methods in order to avoid creating greater problems down the line.

Contributed by:  Kelly Hallstrom
Visit Kelly’s blog, You Don’t Have To Be A Rocket Scientist
Follow Kelly on Twitter.

 

CDC Threat Report on Drug-Resistant Bacteria:

http://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/threat-report-2013/

CDC and hand washing:

http://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/

 

Greenblum, S., Turnbaugh, P., & Borenstein, E. (2011). Metagenomic systems biology of the human gut microbiome reveals topological shifts associated with obesity and inflammatory bowel disease Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109 (2), 594-599 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1116053109

A Four Billion Mile Road Trip to Grandma’s

A comet is a celestial body that is trapped in orbit

around something large. When close to the sun they

have tails. The tail is material from the frozen comet

that is released from the comet when the sun’s energy

heats it. But the tail doesn’t follow the comet. It

always points away from the sun – blown by the solar

wind. Comet 67P/C-G’s tail will be 100,000 miles long

when it is closest to the Sun next year.

On November 12, 2014, man will perhaps accomplish something unprecedented. That is, with a ton of good planning and more than a little luck. The landing craft, Philae, will set down on a comet. I hope you realize how amazing that is.

The comet, named 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, or 67P/C-G for short, has a period of 6.6 years. Every 2/3 of a decade or so, it travels in from deep space to make a trip around the sun. For this particular trip, there was a probe waiting on it, the Rosetta orbiter. After going into orbit around 67P/C-G, Rosetta is now set to release Philae to drop down and land on the comet's surface.

But how did Rosetta meet the comet? It took a lot of doing. Comet 67P/C-G is traveling at a steady rate of 24,600 mph (39,589 kph). That means it travels from NYC to Boston in 30 seconds. Let’s see the planned NYC-Boston maglev train match that!

When we send rockets into space to meet the International space station, they only have to travel 17,000 mph (27,358 kph). The ability to reach this higher speed, just to get into the orbit of the comet could be achieved two ways.

One - you could put all the fuel on board the orbiter and thrust yourself to the proper speed. But that would require a space ship the size of a football field. You just can’t get all that fuel into space for a price anyone could pay. So that’s out.

Second - you could use the power of gravity. By launching Rosetta out into space and then having it swoop by a planet, it can use the gravity of the planet to pull it to a higher speed and then curve around the planet and get shot out the other side. Every time you do this, you gain some speed.

Rosetta achieved its amazing pace by three separate Earth gravity assists and one Mars gravity assist. It has traveled over 3.8 billion miles just to gain enough speed so it can sneak up behind the comet. And how long did this take? Rosetta/Philae were launched in 2004! And my kids have a hard time planning for a paper due in two weeks.

You can see the gravity assists that Rosetta used to catch

up with 67P. Also notice that Rosetta went into

hibernation for three years. It’s instruments run on solar

power, but it was 500 million miles from the sun. Out

there you only get about 4% of the sunlight we get here on Earth.

They’ve come a long way at ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA, the two agencies running the mission. Compare Rosetta’s progress to that of Voyager 1. True, Voyager has traveled farther (4.4 billion miles, 7.1 billion km), but it was launched in 1976!

After all this chasing, now Philae is ready to separate from Rosetta and land on 67P/C-G. This is where the luck comes in. Once Philae leaves Rosetta, there is no controlling it’s path. The plan, based on thousands of photographs taken of 67P/C-G’s surface by Rosetta while in orbit, is to land on Philae somewhere flat and sunny.

Flat is obvious, the comet’s surface is mostly irregular, with huge boulders and deep crevices; finding a good parking spot on 67P is harder than the week before Christmas at the mall. Flat is also important so Philae can get a good grip. Gravity is so low on 67P that there is a fear that Philae will just bounce off the surface, even though it will be moving at a pace similar to a slow walk.

The ESA had a naming contest for the landing spot for

Philae, shown above. The winner – Aglilkia. Suggested by

150 people, Agilkia is an island in the Nile River where

several temples were moved when the Nile Valley was

flooded by the Aswan dams. The Island they were moved

from – Philae. The numbers show the diameters of the

boulders to give it some scale.

To help with this, Philae has several hooks it will deploy to stab into the surface of the comet – hopefully. We don’t know how hard the surface is, or if the lander will come down in a place where there isn’t a rock in the way. See what I mean by luck?

As far as sunny is concerned, the sun is needed to charge the instruments on Philae. If they land in the shade, she’s only going to be functional for about 60 hours. With a good sunny spot, she might work for up to 6 months.

The question you’re now asking is, “Work to do what?” Why spend all this money and time to land on a comet? In response, I ask if you care where your parents came from, or their parents. Go back far enough and you have to wonder where life on Earth came from. Did life start here on its own or was it brought here?

Philae may help answer these questions. Comets are rock, ice, and who knows what else. Water is needed for all life that we know about, so did comets bring water to Earth? Is there something alive in the ice, or are the building blocks for life present on that comet? Philae has nine instruments to help answer these questions.

If Philae finds organic molecules, then we better start preparing a list of questions for our neighbors, because that finding will almost assure us that they’re out there. And it may mean more -chirality in organic molecules is important here on Earth.

Amino acids in Earth based life are all left-handed (called

L). Their mirror image is the D-amino acid, but they don’t

work the same way in proteins. D- amino acids would

make a protein fold differently, and the way a protein

folds determines its function. If there are amino acids of

67P/C-G, will they be L- or D-?

Many organic molecules have a handedness in how they are constructed. Our amino acids are all left-handed (see this post), while our sugars are right-handed (see this post). If the organic compounds on 67P/C-G are the same, then life elsewhere is going to look a lot like we do.

If they are opposite handed, then Star Trek got it wrong with all those humanoid aliens, and we may be for some real surprises in the future.

A 2012 paper explains how one of the instruments on Philae is designed just for chirality question. It will determine the handedness of any organic molecules found on 67P/C-G. After all, it is important to find Grandma, and 67P/C-G might be her house, or at least her hulking old sedan with the 35 gallon gas tank and steering wheel as big as a hubcap.

Comets are remnants from when the solar system was young; they are where we were, and we need to know them in order to get a better idea of where we should be going. I personally am very excited to find out if we are alone in the universe – that would be so sad. Isn't that important enough for a 3.8 billion mile road trip?

Contributed by Mark E. Lasbury, MS, MSEd, PhD

As Many Exceptions As Rules

Evans, A., Meinert, C., Giri, C., Goesmann, F., & Meierhenrich, U. (2012). Chirality, photochemistry and the detection of amino acids in interstellar ice analogues and comets Chemical Society Reviews, 41 (16) DOI: 10.1039/c2cs35051c

The Friday Five

Highlighting some of the coolest science news we’ve seen lately.

1. Ever get the feeling that your brain is slowing down? When people say, “Think fast!”, you usually respond in a day or two? Perhaps you’ve been infected by an algal virus (especially if you live in the Baltimore area where this study was conducted). A virus (ATCV-1) that typically infects green algae can also infect human brain tissue, and now a study has shown a link in those who are infected with slowed brain activity.

This algal virus can infect people too, and may make them slower on the draw with shorter attention spans.

 

2. Do you think you know the primary colors? How about the number of senses that we have? You might be surprised at the true answers. Read on to learn the truth about five things we were taught in science class.

3. Everyone’s favorite attraction at the fair is the daring performer who eats and breathes fire. In the video below, you can learn the chemistry behind fire eating and why the performers don’t melt their faces off.
 

4. Thanks to lessons from computer science, it may be possible to “debug” our brains in ways that parallel how programmers edit bad code. Read it now before you get distra---oh, look, a squirrel!

 

5. And now…5 of the craziest science stunts that teachers won’t show you in school. Except maybe this teacher.

 

Science quote of the week:

“Exploring the unknown requires tolerating uncertainty.” –Brian Greene

Contributed by:  Bill Sullivan

Follow Bill on Twitter: @wjsullivan

Yolken, R., Jones-Brando, L., Dunigan, D., Kannan, G., Dickerson, F., Severance, E., Sabunciyan, S., Talbot, C., Prandovszky, E., Gurnon, J., Agarkova, I., Leister, F., Gressitt, K., Chen, O., Deuber, B., Ma, F., Pletnikov, M., & Van Etten, J. (2014). Chlorovirus ATCV-1 is part of the human oropharyngeal virome and is associated with changes in cognitive functions in humans and mice Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1418895111

I Am Groot! Plants Are More “Alive” Than We Think

So who saw Guardians of the Galaxy this summer? Awesome, wasn’t it? How could a movie with a talking raccoon and a 1970s-based soundtrack go wrong? Oh, and then there’s Groot, the beloved walking, talking tree-like creature who sprouted the catch phrase, “I AM GROOT!” Until Groot, the only sentient plants children probably knew of were the Evil Trees hurling apples at Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. But Groot was a “Giving Tree” incarnate.    



Groot shatters the evil living plant stereotype and saves the day in Guardians of the Galaxy.

 

Groot was so endearing, he has given my kids a new reason not to eat their veggies – they don’t like the idea of slaughtering plants. When I reminded the kids that plants are only sentient in the movies, they gave me the look of skepticism. I know it well…I taught it to them. This inspired me to leaf through some botany literature. Much to my surprise, my kids might have a point! Plants are more “alive” than we ever imagined.

Exhibit A.  Plants know when they are being eaten alive! And they fight back…

There is a plant that scientists typically use as a model to study in the lab called Arabidopsis (thale cress, similar to broccoli but tastes even worse). Researchers recently discovered that when they expose these plants to vibrations that mimic those produced by a hungry caterpillar, the plants increase production of glucosinolate and anthocyanin defenses. These are mustard oils that don’t sit well with caterpillars. In other words, the plants can tell when they are being chewed on and release oils to deter the predator.

Another sophisticated defense system used by plants comes from studies on tobacco. When caterpillars attack, these tobacco plants produce “green leaf volatiles”, compounds that act as a distress call by attracting insects that devour caterpillars!

The Hungry Caterpillar: Adorable children's tale or a horror story of gruesome predation?

 

Exhibit B. Plants have a memory and can be trained.

Everyone is familiar with the story of Pavlov’s dog, the famous experiment that demonstrated classical conditioning. Dogs salivate when presented with meat. If you ring a bell before presenting the meat, the dogs become conditioned to salivate at just the sound of a bell. Plants do a similar thing when exposed to light. Researchers have shown that when a plant is exposed to a certain wavelength of light, and then infected with a plant pathogen, the plant “learns” to build up resistance to that pathogen when it “sees” that particular wavelength of light once again. Plants that were infected and then exposed to the light developed no protective response. Plants must possess some sort of biochemical nervous system and memory in order to execute this kind of behavior.

Plants don’t have a brain, but they do behave as if they can think.

 

Exhibit C. Plants protect their young.

Seeds are the equivalent of a plant’s babies and plants have evolved a variety of fascinating ways to take care of their young. Consider serotinous plants, which keep some of their seeds inside the plant body instead of releasing them into the environment where they can be eaten or destroyed by weather. These plants can hold onto their seeds and release them when the time is most favorable for them to survive.

In the 1986 film, “Little Shop of Horrors”, the carnivorous plant Audrey II demonstrated a terrifying new way plants could protect their kin.

 

In another striking example, scientists studying a plant called sea rocket (Cakile edentula) noticed that when grown in a pot with a different member of its species, its roots grew wildly so to soak up more water and nutrients from its competitor. However, if the sea rocket was put into the same pot as its offspring, this competition did not take place!

Still not convinced that plants are more alive than we give them credit for? Check out this video by Michael Pollan.
 

 

While the evidence above isn’t sufficient to conclude that plants on Earth are like Groot, it is clear they are capable of some level of feeling and response. But don’t tell your vegetarian friends…what else would they eat?

Contributed by:  Bill Sullivan

Follow Bill on Twitter.

 

 

Appel HM, & Cocroft RB (2014). Plants respond to leaf vibrations caused by insect herbivore chewing. Oecologia, 175 (4), 1257-66 PMID: 24985883

Allmann, S., & Baldwin, I. (2010). Insects Betray Themselves in Nature to Predators by Rapid Isomerization of Green Leaf Volatiles Science, 329 (5995), 1075-1078 DOI: 10.1126/science.1191634

Karpiński S, & Szechyńska-Hebda M (2010). Secret life of plants: from memory to intelligence. Plant signaling & behavior, 5 (11), 1391-4 PMID: 21051941

Dudley SA, & File AL (2007). Kin recognition in an annual plant. Biology letters, 3 (4), 435-8 PMID: 17567552

Where Do All Those Leaves Come From?!

I wanted to link my leaf raking drudgery to some scene

in a famous movie. No go. Raking leaves is so mundane

that I could only find one movie that showed someone

raking leaves – Disney’s The Odd Life of Timothy Green.

And heck, he sprang up from a garden, all those leaves

are his cousins!

It’s Fall if you hadn’t noticed. Apple cider, football, pumpkin, wonderful colors….. and raking leaves. I spent last weekend with a rake in my hand and hate in my heart.

Maybe that’s a little strong. But when you spend time trying to put the little beggars in piles and then have to watch the wind scatter them and blow more leaves off the trees – well, you know it’s exasperating.

My efforts resulted in seven 50 gallon bags stuffed with botanical death. All told, more than 400 pounds of biomass. I stare up at the bare branches and wonder, “where did all that matter come from?”

Matter is made of atoms, so the leaves in the trash bags represent literally trillions upon trillions of atoms joined together in specific molecules. So the question is really, what was the source(s) of those particular atoms?

The tree made the leaves, but it didn’t get smaller due to its effort to produce leaves, so the material in leaves didn’t come from the mass of the tree. They were certainly organized by the tree into those biomolecules (proteins, carbohydrates, DNA and RNA, and fats) that make up the leaves, but they didn’t come from the tree originally.

The tree has roots in the soil and pulls water and nutrients into its trunk via those roots. Could the soil be where all the mass comes from? Consider this. If you have a potted plant, do you have to add soil to it every year? Nope.

Jan Baptiste van Helmont was a successful scientist, even

though it may not look like it at first. He was wrong about

digestion’s stages, but did include a description of

something that sounds a lot like the enzymes we have.

He said that trees didn’t get there mass from the soil, but

said they did get it from water – wrong. However, he said

air was involved and proposed that air was made of gas –

a word he coined.

Six hundred years ago, a scientist named Jan Baptist von Helmont measured this more carefully. He grew a tree in 200 pounds of soil from a seed until it weighed 190 pounds. Then he weighed the soil again. He found all his original dirt except for 2 ounces. I very much doubt that 190 pounds of tree mass came from two ounces of soil.

Everyone knows that trees need water. During a drought, your trees die and your grass turns brown. If water is that crucial, maybe my 400 hundred pounds of dead leaves came from water.

Water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen (H₂O).  Can all the leaves be made from just water? No way; trees (and every other living thing on Earth) are carbon based. The proteins sugars, lipids, and nucleic acids are all built on a backbone of carbon atoms, with oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen atoms in some specific spots.

Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen are the main elements of life. You can’t change one atom into another (with the exception of radioactive elements) so all the mass in my bags of leaves couldn’t have come from just water. Certainly some of the mass came from water, after all, living things are mostly water, but there’s no way the carbon came from water.

When a tree uses sugars to make energy, some water is produced. This is called metabolic water, and we do it too. You can prove this by breathing on a mirror. See that condensation? Much of that is metabolic water. Metabolic water is important in producing the molecules of life, so important that some animals, like the kangaroo rat, can live only on metabolic water, they never drink!

Kangaroo rats can live their lives without drinking even

though they live in Death Valley. Another fun fact – they

have fur-lined cheek pouches for carrying seeds back to

their den. No drinking and fur in their oral cavity – worst

case of dry mouth ever!

So a bit comes from water, even less from soil, and none of the leaf mass springs from the tree itself. What do we have left? Only one choice comes to my mind - and your breathing it right now. 

Air? Really? How could 400 hundred pounds of leaves come from the air? It seems silly, but it’s the basis of life on Earth. Air is 78% nitrogen (N₂), 21% oxygen (O₂), and 0.00397% carbon dioxide (CO₂) – plus some water vapor. This is almost everything a growing tree needs, except for some trace minerals that can be found in that 2 ounces of disappeared soil that von Helmont measured 600 years ago. 

Basically, those things we humans breathe out (CO₂, H₂O, O₂, and N₂) are exactly what plants need to grow. We actually use only a small portion of the oxygen that we breathe in, but we do add some carbon dioxide to the air when we exhale. This is a big reason why talking to your plants makes them grow better; you're increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in their immediate vicinity.

Plants take carbon dioxide from the air, and using the energy of sunlight, turn it into carbohydrates – this is photosynthesis. But they don’t just use the carbs for energy. The sugars are the carbon basis for synthesizing every biomolecule the plant will need in order to build leaves and wood.

We have covered carbon (from CO₂), hydrogen (from rain and metabolic water), oxygen (from carbon dioxide and metabolic water), but what about the nitrogen in DNA and proteins? Believe it or not, that comes from the air too.

N₂ in the air is hard to tear apart so the nitrogen can be used in building biomolecules. Plants can “fix” carbon themselves, turning gaseous carbon to solid carbon during photosynthesis, but they can’t fix nitrogen. To turn nitrogen into a form they can use, plants rely on nitrogen fixing bacteria in the soil.

Many plants form a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen fixing bacteria, letting them live inside nodules of their roots. Therefore, the nitrogen the trees use comes from the air, even if it passes through the bacteria first.

The top image is from art student Melchiorri. He claims

that the silk mesh stabilizes the chloroplasts and lets them

produce oxygen via photosynthesis even though they aren’t

in a cell. There are problems here, like chloroplasts don’t live

very long. The bottom image is of an artificial leaf that can

produce hydrogen and oxygen gases from water in the

presence of light. Leaves use 1% of available light; this “leaf”

already uses 7x as much of the light.

Most trees don’t harbor nitrogen-fixing bacteria in their roots, they rely on the nitrogen that the bacteria spread around and leave in the soil, or that nitrogen that comes from dead plant material. One exception is the black locust tree. It is estimated that a black locust stand of trees (and their bacteria) can add 40-60 kg (88 –133 lb.s) of nitrogen to the soil every year.

Now I can rake my leaves confident in the knowledge that I'm raking up a true miracle. They can’t weigh too much, they’re basically nothing but air, water vapor and a bit of bacterial waste. So why does my back hurt so much?

Soon, we may have artificial leaves to deal with. One recent project by art school graduate Julian Melchiorri has used chloroplasts embedded in silk protein mesh in order to carry out photosynthesis. These can be used in space, where plants have a harder time growing in zero gravity. This might be our source of oxygen on the way to Mars.

In addition, new research describes a synthetic leaf made form metal films on either side of a silicon mesh can be used to split water as occurs in photosynthesis. These synthetic leaves might be helpful in producing hydrogen and oxygen for use in fuel cells. I just hope we don’t have to rake them up.


Contributed by Mark E. Lasbury, MS, MSEd, PhD
As Many Exceptions As Rules



Pijpers, J., Winkler, M., Surendranath, Y., Buonassisi, T., & Nocera, D. (2011). Light-induced water oxidation at silicon electrodes functionalized with a cobalt oxygen-evolving catalyst Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108 (25), 10056-10061 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1106545108

The Friday Five – Halloween edition

Highlighting some of the coolest science news we’ve seen lately...Halloween edition!

1. Are ghosts real? Science says there’s not a ghost of a chance!

The scariest thing about this scene:  the paucity of channels on the TV.

2. Looking for a way to merge your love of physics with trick or treating? Check out these physics-themed Halloween costume ideas.

This Halloween, go as anti-matter!

 

3. We have nothing to fear but biochemistry. The American Chemical Society has released a neat little video about the chemistry of fear.

 

4. Ever wonder what would happen if you could cross a panda and an owl? A bird with a baboon? Here is a collection of eerie animal hybrids generated with a little help from Photoshop.

The Pandowl

5. Here’s how to make some creepy Halloween decorations from the comfort of your own haunted house!

Science quote of the week:

“Back off, man! I'm a scientist!” –Peter Venkman, Ghostbusters

Contributed by:  Bill Sullivan

Follow Bill on Twitter: @wjsullivan