Month: February 2018

Shelterbelt Trees in Snow and Fog

Have you noticed how trees hollow out melted sleeves from snow around their boles as our arms would if we could hold them long enough in a snow blanket? And have you wondered why winter fog sinking over open fields is denser than in adjacent woodland? I never gave them much thought until a recent winter walk, but isn’t it often so that the familiar and banal is suddenly thrust to attention to look fresh and strange?

The brain suppresses absorption with too much detail until the detail becomes important or something or someone points it out. I can’t put my finger on what drew my attention to melting snow and thinning fog one day, and it wasn’t more important than the other stimuli bombarding my sense organs. Most noise is filtered out in the conscious brain to avoid being swamped and making us go crazy. But looking intently at something commonplace for the first time can stir uncommon curiosity.

Almost everyone prefers a simple explanation to an obscure one, which is the wisdom of Occam’s razor. When I had students in class they loathed to hear me say: “I have several hypotheses to offer for this observation, and there is evidence for all of them …” That was a way of admitting ignorance without sounding ignorant. Nature is more complicated than we are sometimes wont to admit or accept.

Foggy morning at Jamestown Island

We are drawn to the single explanation, but when we look more closely and are better informed we often find two, and on even closer examination we realize there are four, and then we begin to wonder if we’ll ever get to the bottom of the mystery. We are tempted to turn back to simplicity and turn our backs on provisional knowledge to cling to intuition. I don’t believe in fairy stories, but I know the temptation to be willfully ignorant and it must be resisted.

There is a bottom to the pit of curiosity, a place where facts are finally robust against doubt, but plumbing the depths can take a long time, even generations of science and philosophy. If we boast about our knowledge we fool ourselves because science is still young. Besides, isn’t mystery something to celebrate except when it holds down human welfare or harms our environment (basically the same things)? Mystery is a call to act and understand and is often more intriguing than the mere appearance of knowledge, and perhaps that’s why it is so popular in fiction.

I started musing about snow crystals melting around trees and foggy water droplets vanishing in shelterbelts. Why do they?

Elementary physics offers an easy first answer to my sudden curiosity. Tree bark absorbs some radiant energy, especially the darker shades, even on a cold day when we hardly feel heat of the sun on our faces. It may seem too trivial to change the physical state of water in snow and fog, but the heat stored by day is slowly released to help a slow thaw continue at night. The scientist wants to test a bare theory by experiment. Next time it snows I will check a natural experiment by comparing the melt around maples and oaks with the lighter boles of silver birches, which should in theory remain snow-bound longer.  And here is another question for an inquisitive walker. Does snow melt as quickly on rocks as tree trunks of the same color, and if not why the difference?

A second explanation is that trees offer shelterbelts against chill winds. More heat is lost by radiation from open ground on cold days and freezing nights than among trees, which also reduce wind velocity to stabilize a warmer zone. If you ever get stranded on a bitter night in the countryside it’s wise to find shelter in woods. But it’s hard to see how shelter accounts for melted ‘sleeves’ of snow around trees.

Casting around for other explanations, I wonder how much heat is generated by the thin cylinder of living cells under the bark when trees are looking dead in winter. To be alive is to be engaged in combustion because heat is the by-product of metabolism, generating 500 kJ per mole of oxygen when complete, to be precise.

It seems unlikely the low ebb of metabolism in sleeping winter trees warms the snow, and heat is more likely to be generated on tree bark than under it. To think of microbes and fungi is to remember hot compost and sweaty manure, as well as bubbles of carbon-dioxide popping in the air trap of a home brewer’s dewar. They can be sources of prodigious heat, and commercial breweries sometimes struggle to keep temperatures down.

Tidewater Virginia is marching toward spring and unlikely to see more hard weather so my questions about silver birches and rocks will dangle until I am trudging through snow again next winter.

Next Post: Snow tracks

 

Human Egg Farming

We called the ambitious program, ‘Egg Farming,’ over 30 years ago when I worked at Edinburgh University. That goal drew a step closer today as my graduate student from so many years ago published results of growing human eggs in vitro, to a blaze of publicity.

We started by growing mouse and rat eggs in Petri dishes. They were tiny cells nested in follicles that nurse their development, and some reached full size in a week and even ovulated a fertile egg into the culture medium. Our sole competitor in this new science was in the USA where John Eppig developed a more efficient method, and he called the first pup conceived from an egg grown in vitro, ‘Egbert.’ He was a strange and obese animal, and we worried if egg farming was too risky to apply in veterinary or human medicine, but many healthy mice were born later.

Human egg (oocyte). Courtesy: Lucinda Veeck Gosden

It seemed a huge leap from mouse to clinic. Human eggs grow more slowly in the ovary, and we expected the cultures would take weeks or even months and be risky. Progress was agonizingly slow because human ovarian tissue is rarely available for research, especially at the premenopausal ages required. Instead of relying on rodents, we needed intermediate species to forge better methods, and turned to sheep and cow ovaries. Visits to the local slaughterhouse for discarded tissue from butchered carcasses were some of the most unpleasant experiences ever, and almost turned me vegetarian from hearing the crack of the bolt-gun followed by a heavy slump. But they helped us to gain new knowledge when human tissue was unavailable.

A view of Edinburgh and its castle

Professor Telfer’s team in Edinburgh has succeeded with human eggs through careful work with clinical colleagues who asked consent from women to donate tiny slivers of ovarian tissue during C-section. The biopsy doesn’t harm them.

They watched eggs growing in dishes from the earliest stages to full size when a nuclear division occurred and signaled they were ready for fertilization. It is puzzling why the growth is much faster in vitro than in the body, though it is welcome if the eggs are no less competent for making babies. They look normal, but we know from experience how deceptive appearances can be. The only sure test is to fertilize eggs to see if they create healthy embryos, and that will require a special license under UK law.

Why is farming eggs worth the trouble and long struggle?

Progress will continue at a dawdling pace because a mature egg is the rarest cell in the body. For every egg ovulated each month, a man makes 3 billion sperm cells which offer researchers enough material for galloping discoveries in testes. Animals that fertilize eggs outside the body, like frogs and most other species, release as many eggs as they can make because the cost to them is small while superovulation maximizes the chance of making babies. But ovulation in mammals with internal fertilization and pregnancy is restrained by the limited accommodation of the uterus. Nature has arranged a bottle-neck in the egg production line to ensure that few eggs, or only one or at most two in humans, ripen at a time. The rest are consigned to the trash, which egg farming aims to rescue.

If more eggs can be ripened in vitro there will be benefits for animal breeding technology and young patients will have a better chance of preserving their fertility after freezing ovarian tissue during sterilizing treatment for cancer and other diseases. Egg farming will work better for child patients with their larger stores of eggs than in adults. Nearly a quarter-century ago, our first patient at an infant age had ovarian tissue stored while she was treated for Wilm’s tumor. The news from Edinburgh today was welcome for her and others with investments in the frozen ovary bank.

Next Post: Snowy tracks

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