Cars are getting stolen for the most valuable metals on the planet
Plus regenerating arms and legs, ants that have farmed for millions of years, COVID news, the science and history of pizza, and 100 years of insulin.
Hello!
I hope you are doing well (or at least getting by) in the new year. Yes, I know that years are made-up entities, but they are useful psychologically.
If you’ve been infected by Omicron, I wish you a very speedy and full recovery. If you’re waiting on boosters, I hope that your wait is short.
I don’t have any resolutions for 2022, but I’ve set a goal for myself for this year and beyond.
Don’t take people or what you have in life for granted, and don’t let others take you for granted either.
I’ll get right to it then.
The pandemic reason that so many cars are getting stolen
Here’s a question for you.
What’s the most valuable metal in the world?
It’s not gold or platinum. It is rhodium and a small amount of it is used in catalytic converters that have been used in cars since the mid-1970s to clean up pollutants that might otherwise enter the atmosphere. (Catalytic converters don’t take out carbon dioxide so we still have to worry about greenhouse emissions).
The catalytic converter is just behind the exhaust manifold. It contains a honeycomb that increases surface area and has a very thin layer of precious metals— palladium, rhodium, and platinum.
These metals have always been rare, but closed mines due to the pandemic coupled with high demand and supply-chain issues have raised their prices.
Car thefts are on the rise in the United States, but thieves are not always keeping the cars they steal. They’re often just sawing out the catalytic converters so the rare metals can be recycled and used again. The amount of these metals is miniscule and in the grams, but they can fetch hundreds or even thousands of dollars on markets, making it worthwhile for thieves.
Some more brazen thieves are not stealing cars, but are taking the catalytic converters straight out from under drivers’ noses. With the right equipment, a thief can cut out a catalytic converter from a vehicle with high clearance in a matter of minutes.
How to grow back arms and legs
As any biologist what their favorite animals are and you might hear the name of a salamander called the axolotl.
If you want to grow back arms and legs, you must consider the axolotl. This amphibian can regrow limbs and bits of brains, spinal cords, ovaries, lungs, and hearts. The axolotl is an animal with the frills of Queen Elizabeth and the smile of Mona Lisa. And like Peter Pan, it never fully grows up either.
My most recent column for Hindustan Times is about this wonderful animal, what we know about how it regenerates parts of its body, and what that might mean for human regeneration.
You can wound a limb of an axolotl and it will grow back an exact limb of the same size, shape, and orientation with no scars. How?
Here’s a teaser:
For a few years now, scientists have known that the nerves of the salamander are involved in the process. In a research article published in the scientific journal eLife on November 15, Catherine McCusker and her team at the University of Massachusetts in Boston found that the number of nerves influences the size of the forming axolotl limb. When there are more nerves, there are bigger limbs. With fewer nerves, there are smaller ones. These nerves can influence limb size if their connections to the central nervous system remain intact.
People aren’t the only farmers.
Humans first domesticated crops probably around 15,000 years ago. It’s a huge shift in creating our modern societies.
Meanwhile, certain kinds of ants domesticated crops probably more than 60 million years ago; they’ve been farming and selecting nutritious crop varieties ever since.
For example, leafcutter ants found in North America grow different kinds of fungi. The ants gather leaves and feed the fungi. Ants kill the pests of these fungi. And some of these fungi have come to depend on their relationship with ants that they probably would not be able to live in the wild.
100 years of insulin (and how it failed at first)
The discovery of insulin 100 years ago was arguably one of the greatest medical achievements of the previous century (up there with the discovery of antibiotics which I wrote about a few weeks ago). Before the discovery of insulin, a diagnosis of type I diabetes was literally a slow death sentence. The only treatments known were intense starvation diets.
Naturally, the first book of 2022 that I’m really looking forward to (and have preordered) is Kersten Hall’s Insulin: The Crooked Timber, which highlights this amazing discovery.
Hall has also written an essay at The Conversation that outlines this discovery.
Here’s the most fascinating bit of how Banting and Best injected insulin into the first patient, 14-year-old Leonard Thompson, and at first concluded that there was “no clinical benefit” and then how they changed their minds.
On the afternoon of January 11, 1922, Thompson was injected with 15cc of pancreatic extract that had been prepared by Best. Hopes were high, but the effect was disappointing. Despite causing a 25% drop in Leonard’s blood sugar levels, he continued to produce ketones – a sure sign that the extract had only limited anti-diabetic effect. But much more seriously, the extract had triggered a toxic reaction resulting in the eruption of abscesses at the injection site. Reporting on this work in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Banting and Best drew the dismal conclusion that “no clinical benefit was evidenced” by the injection of their extract.
Two weeks later, on January 23, Thompson was injected once again. And this time, the result was starkly different. When they published their work, the Toronto team recorded that Thompson “became brighter, more active, looked better and said he felt stronger”. His blood sugar levels were markedly reduced. But perhaps the most important result of all was that this time there were no toxic side-effects.
So what had changed in those two weeks? The answer was that this second batch of extract had not been prepared by Banting and Best but by their colleague James Collip. He was a biochemist by training and with his expertise had been able to remove enough of the impurities from the raw pancreatic extract so that, when injected, it did not cause a toxic reaction.
The secret of Collip’s success was alcohol…
The science and history of pizza!
This is one of the best podcast episodes I’ve listened to so far this year. What a freewheeling discussion with a renaissance man!
Dr. Nathan Myhrvold is one of the most prolific inventors with over 900 U.S. patents awarded. He graduated high school at 14, studied under Stephen Hawking in college, became the first Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft, and is now the founder of Intellectual Ventures, where he focuses on tackling big questions. He’s written two James Beard award-winning cookbooks and has come out with a three volume, 1,700-page book about pizza.
End notes…
Last week, CNBC reported the emergence of a “deltacron” variant which is almost certainly an artifact that is the result of a contamination. But millions of people read the story in various forms and shared it broadly.
Later, a Polish press release that got picked up by Bloomberg went viral because it claimed to have found highly prevalent genes that made COVID-19 more deadly in certain populations. At the time of writing there was no underlying technical report, preprint, or paper to look at.
Always be wary of conclusions that can’t be independently verified especially if there’s no data to look at. I wrote about another study that claimed South Asians were more likely to die of COVID-19 in a newsletter back in 2020. I’ve also mentioned some of the caveats of genetic association studies in my COVID-19 book. It’s not as clear as people often make it out to be.
I’ve been in science and science publishing for around 20 years so I have strong thoughts about how science is presented. I’ve thought about science news a lot— especially with respect to what makes a reliable and verifiable scientific article and science story. I’ve covered some of the basics in my COVID-19 book, but for those who are interested I’ll put together a framework for how I verify and scrutinize science articles and science news (that anyone can use) sometime later this year.
Please do publish your framework for verifying and scrutinizing science articles and news!