Smithsonian.com

The plastic skeletons and body models used in classrooms and doctors’ offices may soon become obsolete, it seems, due to one of Google’s latest offerings: Google Body. The program is still in beta (meaning it’s got some bugs); this week its creators added a male body to the female they began with in December. And now users can tour the body, zooming in on various layers—circulatory system, muscles, bones, organs and so on—identifying parts, marking them, making notes.

The “body browser” works only with the most recent versions of Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, but no special plug-ins are required. Instead, the product makes use of WebGL technology to produce the 3-D graphics. The creators say that Google Body works best in newer computers, but I had no problems with the site using Firefox 4.0 on my 5-year-old MacBook last night.

One thing I find fascinating about the project is how it came about: Google has a policy that allows company engineers to spend 20 percent of their time on personal projects, and Google Body came out of the 2o percent time of a group of Web developers in Google’s Cambridge, Massachusetts office who were inspired by the area’s strong medical community.

“We originally built Google Body as a demonstration,” project manager Roni Zeigler told the New York Times News Service, “but we’ve discovered that it has tremendous potential for teaching and patient education.”

A young gorilla in the Hirwa group in Rwanda, 2009 (courtesy of flickr user petercolesdc)

On the one hand, it’s pretty amazing that I can find images of a specific mountain gorilla family in Rwanda through a simple Flickr search. But the availability of those photos comes from the numerous visits of humans to the national parks in Congo, Rwanda and Uganda where the world’s remaining 786 mountain gorillas live, and those visits may have a deadly downside for the gorillas: respiratory infections from human viruses.

Mountain gorillas (Gorilla berengei berengei) live only in the mountainous region where Congo, Rwanda and Uganda meet, and their small numbers make them vulnerable to extinction. To make matters worse, they are sandwiched between some of the most populous areas of Africa, and threatened by habitat destruction and poaching. A lesser known problem is infectious disease, which is the second biggest cause of death for the gorillas, after trauma, and accounts for one fifth of all sudden deaths.

And now a study in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases documents two gorilla deaths from the human metapneumovirus (HMPV) in 2009. During that summer, the Hirwa family of gorillas in Rwanda experienced an outbreak of respiratory disease; 11 of the 12 animals experienced symptoms including coughing, nasal discharge and lethargy. Veterinarians from the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project treated five of the gorillas with antimicrobial drugs, but an untreated adult female and a 3-day-old male died. Analyses of the remains revealed that both individuals had been infected with HMPV, though the adult female died of a secondary bacterial pneumonia infection. The HMPV infection likely predisposed her to pneumonia, the researchers say.

“Because there are fewer than 800 living mountain gorillas, each individual is critically important to the survival of their species,” said Mike Cranfield, executive director of the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project. “But mountain gorillas are surrounded by people, and this discovery makes it clear that living in protected national parks is not a barrier to human diseases.”

The source of the HMPV is unknown, and the two animals that died had not been handled by any of the veterinarians or park staff during the course of their illness. But with the human population ever encroaching and tourists visiting them in their mountain homes, it seems better strategies are needed to protect the gorillas from human diseases.

Recently, while perusing the shelves of my bird-crazy colleague Laura, I came across “Winged Wonders: A Celebration of Birds in Human History,” by Peter Watkins and Jonathan Stockland. The book is full of examples of how birds can be found in art and language, but what particularly intrigued me was a list, in the introduction, of the various names for groups of specific birds. A selection:

If you find three or more peacocks, you can call them a "muster" (photo courtesty of flickr user Jamil Soni Neto)

a building of rooks
a desert of lapwings
an exaltation of larks
a head of pheasants
a herd of cranes, curlew or wrens
a kit of pigeons flying together
a murmuration of starlings
a muster of peacocks
a paddling of ducks on the water
a parliament of owls
a piteousness of doves
a richesse of martins
a rookery of penguins
a seige of herons
a tiding of magpies
an unkindness of ravens
a watch of nightingales
a wedge of geese (or of swans in flight)

I love how some of these terms bring up images of, say, owls crowding into a chamber in Westminster or herons taking up arms against a castle. Others elicit thoughts of sound (starlings) or the bad tidings they are supposed to bring (ravens). Which ones are your favorites? Or are there any great ones I missed?

Men wait for a five-cent-meal during the Great Depression (source: Library of Congress)

There’s this somewhat counter-intuitive idea that economic downturns are good for your health. You might expect the privation and malnutrition inherent in such times would take a toll. But during the Great Depression, mortality rates fell. And since that time, the idea that recessions are a net-positive for health has only grown.

But a new study in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health questions that idea. The researchers examined mortality rates from 114 U.S. cities in 36 states between 1929 and 1937 along with data on bank suspensions, which were used as an indicator of the impact of the financial crisis in the individual states.

They found declines in deaths due to pneumonia, flu and tuberculosis and increases in deaths from heart disease, cancer and diabetes. But none of those causes of death were associated with bank suspensions, and only the increase in deaths from heart disease could plausibly relate to the economic depression, the scientists write.

Two causes of death did correlate with the pattern of bank suspensions: suicide rates rose but motor vehicle accidents declined, so much so that they outweighed the increase in suicides.

But there was more going on in the 1930s than just and economic downturn. The 20th century was a period of great change, particularly in terms of sanitation and health care, two factors that could account for much of the decrease in mortality during the Great Depression. In addition, the New Deal—the economic programs instituted between 1933 and 1936 to respond to the crisis—and Prohibition may have also had positive effects on health.

“Our study provides evidence that even major depressions do not imply mortality crises,” says study lead author David Stuckler, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “Whether health improves or worsens during hard times depends mainly on how governments choose to respond.”

The Last Prayer, by Charles Littlewood (Photographed June 2009, Micanopy, Florida)

Creatures eat other creatures all the time, but it’s not something that is often captured on film, at least not in such an attractive way that it makes the finals of a photo contest. Charles Littlewood of Silver Springs, Florida spotted this rat snake stalking a frog amid the cattails one day in June 2009. “I watched as it approached and marveled that the frog did nothing,” he says. Littlewood then took 185 shots with his camera and entered this one in Smithsonian magazine’s 8th Annual Photo Contest, where it’s one of the top entries in the Natural World category. “The photo demonstrates the persistence required to obtain the views of nature and the lessons to be learned from the participants,” Littlewood says.

There’s only a few days left to enter your vote for the Readers’ Choice Award in this year’s contest; voting closes on March 31. The Grand Prize, Readers’ Choice and category winners will be announced on July 1. And if you’ve captured your own amazing image, consider entering it into the 9th annual photo contest, which is open for submissions until December 1, 2011.

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