Weird Science Weekly: bacteria colours your poop to match your illness

Weird science happens all around us, every day. In this installment of Weird Science Weekly, we have detecting illness through coloured poop, spiders with personality and an unexpected winner for the title of 'largest lifeform on Earth'.

Designer bacteria colour your poop to match your illness

Well, that is not a sentence I thought I'd ever type. But it turns out it's true — scientists in the U.K. are teaming up with art majors to develop a do-it-yourself disease monitoring system that turns your 'Number Two' into 'Colour 1 to 6'. Once you get past the 'squick' factor, it's actually pretty clever. The project, called E. chromi, is the offspring of a brainchild from a team at Cambridge University that competed in the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition in 2009. The initial idea included thoughts of creating a detector that could be added to a well, that would then change colour based on toxins present (and, by doing so, alert people seeking to use the water what they might be ingesting).

A main component in the construction is laboratory-favorite, the infamous E. coli bacteria — popular with the synthetic biology crowd for being friendly to modularization using BioBricks — "a string of DNA that has a particular start and finish sequence, which allows them to be easily joined together." Join a bunch of BioBricks together and you can build yourself a custom bacteria, kind of like LEGO (only smaller). In this case, the team fished the genomes for pigment production out of other bacteria to create BioBricks that would produce a range of colours when they come in contact with different proteins, enzymes and other chemicals.

How do we get from colour-changing water to rainbow poo? One of the applications some researchers have their eye on is how E. Chromi might help doctors get a handle on what's going on in your gut. Drink a yogurt-like shake filled with the engineered bacteria and, once it interacts with the chemicals in your GI tract, your next visit to the bathroom could let you know whether it's just a stomach ache or something more sinister. (Before you worry about chugging an E. coli cocktail, remember that most strains are actually harmless, and the bacteria is already used to produce a lot of synthetic things we need, like insulin for diabetics.)

Thus far, the system is still in the development stages, although it has garnered some interest over the past couple of years as developers look for backing. These kinds of engineered colour-producers may also have a future in fabric and (perhaps ironically) food dyes.

[ Related: Weird Science Weekly: Go-karting babies help researchers study fear ]

Spiders can be extroverts

Lots of us prefer not to think about spiders at all, unless necessary, which is why it's a good thing there are researchers like Lena Grinsted keeping an eye on them. Otherwise, we'd miss out on learning things this.

The U.K. postdoc is co-author of a recently-published paper that demonstrates how the 8-leggers might have personalities all their own. Apparently, spiders that live in social large colonies — which are, no doubt to the relief of arachnophobes out there, rare — may assign duties based on each spider's own personal strengths and weaknesses. Grinsted and her team observed a colony of Stegodyphus sarasinorum, indigenous to India, Sri Lanka and Nepal, for two months, conducting various tests to find commonalities among the beasties that were in charge of hunting for the colony. The colonies, being well-established, should be pretty inbred and homogeneous for most traits, but studies suggest otherwise, at least when it comes to behaviour.

They began by harvesting individuals from a colony and marking them with colour dots, so they could tell them apart in future.

These 40 lucky participants were then tested for their boldness and aggressiveness, as the researchers mimicked bird predators to see which would relax faster after being 'buzzed' and prodded the arachnids with sticks to see who ran and who fought back. After the team felt they understood which spiders were pushy and which were more timid, they put the group back in an artificial nest and allowed them to build some new webs in their natural habitat in the trees. Once the webs were complete, they simulated prey getting trapped and observed which spiders answered the call. Grinsted told Wired "One or two spiders would come out and attack the prey — very often the same few spiders."

Still unknown is what the quieter, homebody spiders get up to while the big and bold are out hunting. With all those legs, you have to wonder if they've considered knitting.

Maggots find quality food by following the crowd

While we're on the topic of creepy crawlers that are more clever than you'd think, fruit fly maggots are surprising McMcaster biologists by showing that they can learn from by picking up cues from their peers. This is perhaps more impressive when you consider that the little wrigglers only have about 3,000 functional neurons in their entire nervous systems, according to the researchers. Better than a Sponge (with none), but still a mental midget compared to, say, a cockroach (with a million).

What they're learning is to follow the crowd ... to food. Biologists Zachary Durisko and Reuven Dukas found that the maggots followed a signal — an odour — produced by their maggoty brethren when they eat. Even though it means more competition for food, the researchers also found that it helped the larvae find higher quality food, so it's a bit of a trade off. Fruit flies are already a popular choice as a stand in for human behaviour studies, because they're more like us than you might expect (at least neurologically speaking). Discovering that they're capable of this kind of learning is useful because it suggests that fruit flies might be a good proxy for social learning studies as well.

[ Related: Weird Science Weekly: Drinking coffee lowers risk of suicide ]

Night Owls more anti-social than Morning People

It's not just because they're grumpier when you wake them up early, either, apparently. A researcher at the University of Western Sydney, in Australia, recently published the results of his survey of 263 students, comparing their early-bird or night-owl tendencies to how they rated on the so-called 'Dark Triad' of personality traits. Which sounds like something made up by Tolkien, but is actually the name given to the grouping of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.

So yeah, those are pretty dark.

Dr. Jonason's study did indeed find a pattern, concluding that a "night-time chronotype" was linked to Machiavellianism, exploitive narcissism and secondary psychopathy. Comparing those who score high on the Triad to "other nocturnal predators such as lions and scorpions," Jonason suggests that there could be an evolutionary answer for the link (if it exists beyond 263 students). If you were up to no good, it would be easier to get your work done in the night, when most everyone else is asleep. He makes the point "the features of the night ... might facilitate the casual sex, mate-poaching and risk-taking the Dark Triad traits are linked to." Jonason adds that, while this could mark an important advance in evolutionary psychological models, more work is needed. It seems like if you're trying to find a disproportionately-large number of people who favor burning the midnight oil, a group of university students is a safe bet.

Couldn't hurt to keep an eye on those night-owls in your life, though. We might be watching you.

That's one big mushroom

Quick, what's the largest living thing on our planet? Blue whale? Those are definitely up there. Great Barrier Reef? Good guess, but that's really a big thing made up of living things. Nope, the biggest single living thing is actually ... a mushroom. Known as the honey mushroom, the giant Armillaria solidipes lives in the Malheur National Forest in Oregon, has been growing an estimated 2,400 years, and covers... get this... 2,384 acres. That's 5.6 km across and stretching at least a metre into the ground.

That puts some perspective on the headline "Giant mushroom discovered in China", but this newcomer is still pretty impressive.

The fungus weighs in at almost 15 kg, measures almost a metre across, and is made up of more than 100 mushrooms attached to a massive stem. It's suspected by some to be the same species as the Oregon monster — a giant honey mushroom — although the type is not yet confirmed and it may be something entirely new. The Chinese province where it was discovered, Yunnan, is no stranger to new mushrooms; it's home to more than 600 species, many of them delicious.

[ More Geekquinox: Video shows vicious predator bug ambushing, eating unsuspecting fish ]

Keep your eyes on the wonders of science, and if you spot anything particularly strange you'd like me to check out for next week, comment below or drop me a line on Twitter!

(Images courtesy: Ginsberg/King, Grinsted, Suthagar/McMaster University, Getty)

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