Just as animals can find their food, GPS seems like it can find almost any spot on Earth. Thanks to this technology, it is now possible to find people lost on mountains, in caves, or at sea. GPS can instantly detect the whereabouts of a car in a city; parents worried about their children are able to track them with ease and precision.

Though we’re able to track people with shocking degrees of accuracy, it’s harder for us to follow the miraculous activities of the micro-structures and complex molecules in our cells. We do not yet have instruments which can accurately track objects that are so small. Though we can see the holes in our skin with the naked eye, we can only see molecules, and smaller structures, with the help of an electron microscope.

Green fluorescent proteins

Taking the minute activities that occur inside an organism and transferring these processes into a visible format, and photographing intracellular chemical changes, are among the major struggles scientists face. Many researches have tried to develop ways to transfer the micro and nano worlds into a visible form.

One way of doing this is called molecular tracking. To do this, scientists track one molecule, which is easy to spot or photograph because of the light it has been conditioned to emit, and connect it to the item they’re going to examine. It is possible to make minute things observable by means of this light-marking method. The question is: how to make the molecule emit light in the first place?

The answer lies in nature. Certain sea creatures emit colorful lights. Producing light as a result of biochemical activity is called “bioluminescence”. Many creatures living in the depths of the sea, as well as fireflies and a few other species, possess bioluminescence.

Bioluminescent creatures live with special proteins that absorb light energy. While they absorb a little of this energy, they reflect the rest, emitting light. For a long time, scientists did not understand how these proteins worked. But in the 1960s, scientists managed to isolate green fluorescent proteins. This was a breakthrough in terms of marking and viewing human cells. The researchers who decoded the chemical structure of these molecules won the 2008 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

One of the most important bioluminescent creatures is the jellyfish aequorea victoria. Shimomura et al first obtained this creature’s proteins through chemical means in 1962. These green fluorescent proteins are now widely used in molecular biology and biochemistry. They are used as gene and cell markers, and thus help scientists determine the amounts of these genes in different organisms.

One of the proteins scientists track is GAD67, a protein which has important duties, particularly in the brain. GAD67 produces some messenger molecules, which function in the communication activities of the nervous system. When scientists want to know if there is GAD67 in the brain or somewhere in the nervous system, they first inject green fluorescent proteins into the cell. Later, they study the cell by using special antibodies attached to the green fluorescent proteins. If there is GAD67 in the tissue, scientists recognize it from the green color. What they are seeing is not actually GAD67, but the green fluorescent proteins attached to it.

These proteins, which are complex structured giant molecules, have a very special geometry and pattern. While even modeling the mathematical structures of a molecule takes much effort, another molecule of a different color produced by another creature makes things easy for researchers. This “marking” makes it possible to understand whether genes work or not, and whether they are active in protein production or not. It is possible to trace connections between cells, observe reactions between proteins, and to find mechanisms that form signals.

During the diffusion of light from the green fluorescent protein, no substance other than oxygen is needed (such as metal ion, phosphate, etc.). Such research can thus be simply conducted by observing the green-lit protein under ultraviolet light. This protein absorbs light from a spectrum between 395 nm and 470 nm. This range is within the wavelengths of light visible to the human eye. Normal proteins diffuse light at 300 nm, and are not visible to humans. Here, we witness another miracle in the way the world are created. It is a blessing that this special protein diffuses light of 450 nm, unlike other proteins.

Uses of green fluorescent proteins

Since the 1970s, fluorescent proteins have been used as markers in researches studying cell biology, biochemistry, and material sciences. The discovery of these proteins marked the beginning of a new era for intracellular (in vivo) research. Scientists have used this method to discover the biochemical workings of bacteria, nematodes (round worms), insects, and mammalian cells. For example, green fluorescent proteins can be used to observe the development of embryos, the unfolding of genes, or to monitor cancer metastasis in the human liver. Since a series of cancerous cells generates a very bright green light, they can easily be spotted. Hopefully, the wider use of such proteins will make identifying cancer easier in the future.

In addition to these discoveries, the emergence of some plant viruses has been observed thanks to these proteins. They’ve also been used to monitor the development of pollen. Lastly, the proteins have been useful when tracking gene transfers from plants to animals.

All of this has been possible because sea creatures absorb light differently than creatures on land. Organisms living underwater diffuse light best at a wavelength of 450-490 nm. The jellyfish who provide the necessary green proteins are perfectly adapted to their environment, and this enables them to hide from their enemies. It is this light that scientists are now using to understand nature – and to potentially save lives.

Jacobs J. et al. Direct recordings of grid-like neuronal activity in human spatial navigation. Nature Neuroscience, 2013

Do you happen to have a poor sense of direction? Do you often find yourself holding a map upside-down? Well, now you can blame your grid cells. Using direct human brain recordings, researchers have identified a novel type of cell in the brain that helps people keep track of their relative location while navigating through an unfamiliar environment. Scientists got this rare opportunity to identify these unique cells while they studied brain recordings of epilepsy patients via electrodes implanted deep inside their brains. These cells have been called “grid cells” because they are activated in a triangular grid pattern. The “grid cell” is distinct among brain cells because its activation represents multiple spatial locations, which allows the brain to keep track of navigational cues, such as how far you are from a starting point or your last turn. This type of navigation is called path integration. During brain recordings, 14 study participants were asked to play a video game where they ride a virtual bicycle to navigate from one point to another to retrieve objects and then recall how to get back to the places where they found the objects. While participants were playing the game, researchers examined the relation between navigation and the corresponding activity of individual neurons. Results were striking: each grid cell responded at multiple spatial locations that were arranged in the shape of a grid suggesting that the navigation information is principally encoded in our brains through this triangular grid pattern. Without grid cells, humans would frequently get lost or have to navigate based solely on landmarks. Differences in how well the grid cells work could potentially explain why some people have a better sense of direction than others. In addition, grid cells are located in the entorhinal cortex which is a critical component of human memory. The entorhinal cortex is also the first brain region affected in Alzheimer’s disease. Thus, understanding how grid cells work could potentially help us to understand why people with Alzheimer’s frequently become disoriented as well as to develop new strategies to improve brain function in the affected individuals.

Giant viruses open Pandora’s box

Philippe N. et al. Pandoraviruses: amoeba viruses with genomes up to 2.5 Mb reaching that of parasitic eukaryotes. Science, 2013 Jul 19

On a fairly ordinary day, two French biologists were analyzing water samples collected off the coast of Chile. What they saw under the microscope was quite amazing: a previously unidentified organism, about the size of a bacterial cell, appeared as a large dark spot. Astonishingly, these new organisms seemed to be infecting and killing the amoeba in the water. Later, another group of researchers found a similar organism in a pond in Australia. Both groups soon realized that they discovered a type of “giant” virus which is at least twice as big as the largest known viruses. The biggest virus discovered so far was called Mimiviruses, with a size of 700 nanometers and carrying more than 1000 genes. The newly discovered viruses are called Pandoraviruses, which are 1 micrometer long and 0.5 micrometers across. Pandoraviruses are visible under a light microscope and contain more than 2500 genes. A viral genome consisting of 2500 genes is extremely large compared to known viruses, such as the Influenza or HIV, which only contain 10 genes or less. More importantly, 93% of the genes did not resemble any known lineage in the natural world, suggesting Pandoraviruses are not related to any known virus family and may represent a new life form. These findings generated new perspectives about how scientists see viruses. It raised the possibility that there might be many different kinds of giant viruses out there to be discovered. Some biological features in these giant viruses could easily blur the line between life forms and viruses, which are considered to be non-living. Although Pandoraviruses do not infect human cells, there might be other giant viruses out there that could infect human cells. There are still a lot of human diseases known to have an infectious component but for which no infectious agent has been identified yet. This study will definitely encourage people to actively look for the role of giant viruses in some diseases.

See through the Ears

Haigh A. et al. How well do you see what you hear? The acuity of visual-to-auditory sensory substitution. Frontiers in Psychology, 2013 Jun 18

Scientists have created a revolutionary device for the blind that allows them see the world through their ears. The device “vOICe” trains the brain to invoke mental images of what they are hearing around them. The first test trial of vOICe has been performed on blindfolded sighted people. The participants took a standard eye test where they were asked to view the letter E turned in four directions and in various sizes. The best visual acuity is considered 20/20 (distance in feet/size of the E) and the majority of participants were able to achieve the best performance possible, nearly 20/400 sight. This is an impressive result when compared to an alternative stem-cell based sight restoration technique, which only yielded 20/800 visual acuity. In addition, the affordable and non-invasive nature of vOICe would offer a unique option. But, how might this work in practice? One can imagine that visually-impaired people would wear a discreet head-mounted camera such as Google Glass and receive wireless audio information through mini earbuds. As the person turns to look in various directions, the device scans images and correlates those with soundscapes, then the person’s brain would momentarily translate those into mental images of the objects — like braille for the ears. These sensory substitution devices could potentially be employed in combination with other alternative invasive techniques to train the brain to see again, or even to see for the first time.

According to a study by researchers of the Human Footprint Project [1], humans have influenced 83% of the earth’s surface. The study is based on four factors: population, travel routes, land use, and lights. One of the findings of the study shows that an average American is responsible for more carbon emissions in one year, than a person in Tanzania in a lifetime. This significant difference is certainly related to the average lifespan, income, culture, and climate. However, do any of us have the rights to disturb the environment more than others? Are we consuming something that doesn’t belong to us, and leaving an unsustainable environment for future generations? To answer these questions, it is imperative that we understand and acknowledge exactly what we have inherited, what we are responsible for, and what we will leave to future generations.

Our influence on the earth and environment in a general sense is not limited to the consumption of goods. One of the most influential yet less-visible traces is the footprint we leave in the digital environment. There are active or passive traces left in a digital environment by personal activity. An active trace is left when personal information is released by a person himself, whereas a passive trace (digital shadow) is left when personal data is collected during personal activity. These traces, also known as digital footprints, can spread very quickly and may reach to millions in a very short time. One can leave digital traces by simply visiting a website, sending a blog post, or posting a photo or message to a friend’s website.

Our digital traces affect the environment in many ways. Every trace takes our time to generate it and for others to read it. It consumes storage and network resources on the server that increase the costs, power usage, and eventually our carbon footprint, or the total greenhouse gas emissions. We need to seek a balance in our use of digital media in order to utilize the benefits efficiently and to minimize our consumption of time and other resources.

Have you ever wondered “how often a person leaves digital traces behind every day?” or “how much of our privacy are we sharing with others?” A recent study reveals some figures about the size of the digital universe as 281 billion gigabytes (GB) for 2008 and 1.8 billion terabytes for 2011 [2]. The digital trace generated by the average person on a daily basis was about 45 GB in 2008. This includes private information such as emails, photos, VOIP calls, and instant messages.

How about passive digital traces we leave behind by credit card purchases, bank accounts, phone records, web searches, general backup data, medical and hospital records, surveillance cameras, and so on? There are more passive traces collected than our active digital traces, which provide more personal information.

As of 2006, there were over 1 billion Visa credit cards worldwide and counting [3]. Credit cards give a lot of private information about a person: stores we prefer, movies we watch, places we travel, books we read, prescriptions we take, rent and utility fees we pay; mainly our lifestyle is hidden in our credit card statements. It might contain a lot of details we want to keep private. We can easily learn a lot about our social life just by analyzing one of our credit card statements.

Web searches provide more insightful information about a person. 113 billion web searches were conducted in July 2009, a 41 percent increase compared to 2008 [4]. Besides all the information we leave with our credit card, web searches may show things we have not actually done. They contain information about our future plans, such as travel, job search, health related issues, meetings, and education. Websites can provide smarter search results and personalized advertisements according to our search habits. Search engines even know how fast we type or process information, our typos, languages we speak, how smart we search, and even our physical location from the IP address.

Today many cars have GPS (Global Positioning System) capabilities and smart phones have GPS sensors. GPS devices can show our exact location anywhere in the world, provide turn-by-turn instructions from one location to another, provide a list of nearby stores, and warn us about traffic problems. A recent market research [5] estimates that the mobile location technology market that crosses the US will be $75 billion by 2013 with growing usage of GPS capabilities in automobiles and consumer electronics. Beside all the benefits, GPS devices leave an important digital trace behind, our exact location, which can be stored for later use or tracked by third parties.

Even if a person doesn’t have a GPS sensor with him, there are cameras all around the city that can help capture one’s location. We can see cameras inside and outside of the banks, stores, traffic lights, and even closed-circuit TV (CCTV) surveillance cameras in some cities. The total number of CCTV cameras in England is 4.2 million, or one for every 14 people according to an estimate. According to Scotland Yard, one crime per 1,000 CCTV cameras is solved in a year [6].

The number of smart phones increased 13.9 percent worldwide, compared to 2007, and reached 139 million in 2008 [7]. Many smart phones have real-time video streaming capabilities and are widely used. Users upload hundreds of thousands of videos per day to YouTube about themselves or people around them. Considering that there are thousands of video sharing websites like YouTube, sharing videos on these websites lies at the center of important privacy concerns. There are websites to share videos, photos, music, location, blog posts, and personal updates. With the rise of the micro-blogging trend, we can see real-time updates about a person on websites like Twitter. This allows us to track every minute of a person’s life.

Social networking is a new way of communication. Many websites provide tools to build online communities of people, who want to share and learn interests and activities of others. We can build our friend list and share photos, videos, and updates about our life. According to Nielsen Online’s report on Internet usage in June 2009 [8], users spent an average of 4 hours and 39 minutes during June on one of the most famous social networking sites, Facebook, which has 87 million visitors. Normally these websites provide privacy settings to limit who can access our friend list, photos, or other information. Since most of the people don’t refuse friend requests, it is very easy to be added as a friend and get access to all the private information of people we do not even know. Once we get accepted by a person as a friend, it gets easier to be accepted as friend by his/her friends, since we have mutual friends. These connections increase our friend list exponentially.

I had known about this process for some time, so I wanted to confirm it myself by setting up an account with fake information and identity on Facebook in 2008. I selected a college and input random personal information to my profile. I visited some group pages on Facebook and joined them. Then Facebook started to offer possible friend lists that have common interests with me. I started to make random friend requests to many users on these lists. In one day, I had around a hundred friends in my list that I don’t know personally. As a friend on their list, I have access to all information they share with others. Most of the users are using default settings and are not aware of privacy issues. Even if we are careful about all these settings and our privacy, our information is accessible by website managers. Digital traces left by users are valuable commercial assets for companies, and most of them share or sell this information to third party companies which provide online advertisements, products, and services.

There is a positive side of these digital traces. Websites provide better recommendation of products and services, targeted advertisements, smarter search results, and personal news. Entertainment businesses can provide appropriate suggestions by using location services. However, erasing our digital traces is difficult or even impossible in some cases. To protect our privacy and identity, it is essential that we are aware of places our personal information is stored. It is the responsibility of websites to protect user’s data. However, it will be a good start to be aware as users of our traces on the digital universe and to share personal information carefully.

With various effects on our natural and social environment, digital traces are one of the most influential and yet less known by-products of consumption. It is an important responsibility for us to decide how we affect our environment, how we spend our time, and what we are going to leave to future generations. With all the unique values given to humans, we need to learn to make meaningful contributions and carry more responsibility for our actions, especially in the digital world where boundaries are unlimited.

Acknowledgment: This article is produced either in part or a whole at MERGEOUS [9], an online article and project development service for authors and publishers dedicated to the advancement of technologies in the merging realm of science and religion.

Halil I. Demir is an internet entrepreneur and freelance writer.

References

1. Wildlife Conservation Society [http://www.wcs.org/humanfootprint]
2. EMC Report, “The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe,” 2008.
3. Visa USA Internal Statistics, Q4 2006.
4. ComScore Press Release, August 31, 2009.
5. RNCOS Market Research Report, “World GPS Market Forecast to 2013,” April 2009.
6. Telegraph, 24 Aug 2009.
7. Gartner Press Release, Worldwide Smartphone Sales, Mart 2009.
8. Nielsen Online’s Report, June 2009.
9. Mergeous [http://www.mergeous.com]