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Survival at a Mountain Top

16/6/2020

 
Picture
Have you ever heard of a pika? It was a new animal to me.  It lives in mountains at 10,000 feet and, as a skier, I have been to its habitat many times but didn't know where or how to look for it.  
Thanks to Pika Country: Climate Change at the Top of the World by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent & Marlo Garnsworthy, I am now enlightened.  The pika, also know as a rock rabbit,  is yet another version of a canary in a coal mine.  It requires cool summer temperatures to forage for food, (mostly grasses that dry to become hay) and stockpile enough to stay alive all winter.  

                     "Pikas are specially adapted to live in the chilly alpine environment among
                       the rocks and plants.
                      "In fact, pikas are usually only found in the mountains where the temperatures
                        are cool.  In temperatures warmer than 77 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius),                            pikas quickly overheat and die."

Pika Country, illustrated with photographs by skilled nature photographer Dan Hartman, is a picture book with intimate images of the pika barking, leaping, squeezing into a small rock crevasse, and carrying a mouthful of vegetation.  How did he ever get those shots?  Obviously, he had to be there, be ready and be patient.

The poor pika is prey to mountain mammals, like the weasel and fox and raptors, including the golden eagle and the prairie falcon.  Added to its woes, its habitat is shrinking due to climate change.  Where can you go when you're at the top of the hill and there's no more "up" to go?

The authors are exceptionally good at explaining the predicament by including many other alpine animals and trees that will be wiped out when mountain tops warm up.

They also include an excellent explanation of climate change and what kids (and caring adults) can do to slow down climate change.  Maybe it will also create the demise of the winter olympics? 

A Picture of the Coronavirus at Work

16/6/2020

 
Picture
- CDC/ Alissa Eckert, MS; Dan Higgins, MAM / Public domain
Above is the familiar, iconic electron micrograph of the corona virus that causes the disease COVID-19. Here's what we can learn from the picture. First, it is a scanning electron micrograph (SEM) that shows the three-dimensional surface of the virus.   It is a sphere that is extremely small, 1000 times smaller than the cells it invades.  We cannot see it under an ordinary microscope that uses visible light, because it is smaller than the shortest wavelength of visible light.  It is one thousandth the size of an ordinary cell.

 Under an electron microscope the image is all gray, (like the background) no color.  It is colorized later by people who are trained to recognized structures distinct from a gray background so that that average viewer can easily see them.  Viruses have no color because the wavelengths of all the colors of the rainbow (visible light) are longer than the virus.  So the color of a structure is chosen to stand out by the colorer.  We know its size from the magnification of the electron microscope.  An electron  micrograph   captures  an image of a specially prepared specimen in a vacuum. It cannot show us a living cell, only a frozen snapshot.  
Picture
Colored SEM of cells in alveolus of the lung Credit: Prof. Arnold Brody/Science Photo Library
This is a scanning electron micrograph of the healthy cells lining an air sac (alveolus) of the human lung.  At the center left and top are two type-two cells typically attacked by the novel coronavirus.  They are covered with hair-like structures (microvilli)  and secrete a substance that that reduces surface tension in the air sac and prevent it from collapsing.  The magnification is x 5,100 at the photograph's 6 x 4.5 cm size.  
Picture
Image credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases.
This is a colorized scanning electron micrograph of a lung cell infected with the virus the causes COVID-19. They are the yellow dots on the surface of the cell.  You can see how small they are compared to the cell, which has many projections to increase its surface area for the exchange of gases (oxygen for carbon dioxide), the crucial job of the lungs to keep us alive. 

 The  spikes  on the surface of a COVID -19 coronavirus (you see in the first picture) are proteins that fit like a piece of jig-saw puzzle to receptor proteins on the surface of the host cell.  This fools the cell into inviting the infectious enemy through its membrane. Once inside, the coronavirus finds a ribosome,  a small organelle that makes proteins from RNA codes specific to the organism. (RNA is a single strand of nucleotides with the same sequence as the organism's DNA) . The coronavirus, which is basically RNA with a protein protective coating,  is able to use the replicating machinery of a ribosome to make copies of itself. In the process, it interferes with  the functioning of the lung cell to provide us with oxygen.  The newly minted coronaviruses then squeeze through the cell membrane like tiny buds.  

Meanwhile lots more of the virus are being replicated inside the cell. Upon re-emerging outside the cell, each virus particle is now free to infect other cells in the body and be shed from the person in tiny drops of moisture from speaking, sneezing and coughing.  

Self-replication is an essential activity of all living things.  Is a virus a living thing?  Are there any free-living viruses?  All it can do is replicate itself in the cells of a living host, which range from the smallest bacteria to us.  It doesn't have metabolism, so it doesn't "eat." As long as it doesn't  come across an outside environment strong enough to destroy is complicated molecular structure, it will exist (not "live") as long as it needs to exist until it encounters a receptive host.

It's amazing to see the magnitude of the infection in the microscopic world of a single sick cell.  

     Vicki Cobb

    *Award-winning author of more than 90 nonfiction books for children, mostly in science.
    *Former Contributor to the Huffington Post
    *Founder/President of iNK Think Tank, Inc.
    *Passionate advocate for the joy of learning for every child and teacher.


    Disclaimer: All opinions, typos, and grammatical errors are my own,  especially small word omissions which I often don't notice in my fervor.  

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