Science Tuesday - Dementia, Crocs, and Ants

When Illness Makes a Spouse a Stranger
By DENISE GRADY, The New York Times, May 5, 2012

He threw away tax documents, got a ticket for trying to pass an ambulance and bought stock in companies that were obviously in trouble. Once a good cook, he burned every pot in the house. He became withdrawn and silent, and no longer spoke to his wife over dinner. That same failure to communicate got him fired from his job at a consulting firm.

By 2006, Michael French — a smart, good-natured, hardworking man — had become someone his wife, Ruth, felt she hardly knew. Infuriated, she considered divorce.

But in 2007, she found out what was wrong.

“I cried,” Mrs. French said. “I can’t tell you how much I cried, and how much I apologized to him for every perceived wrong or misunderstanding.”

Mr. French, now 71, has frontotemporal dementia — a little-known, poorly understood and frequently misdiagnosed group of brain diseases that eat away at personality and language. Although it was first recognized more than 100 years ago, there is still no cure or treatment, and patients survive an average of only eight years after the diagnosis.

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A Crocodile Too Huge to Fit on the Family Tree
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, May 7, 2012

Giant crocodiles, far larger than any known to date, lived in Kenya two million to four million years ago among our human ancestors, according to a new report.

A fossil of one specimen, 27 feet in length, shows that it is not closely related to the Nile crocodile, as some scientists had thought, said Christopher A. Brochu, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Iowa and the new study’s first author.

Although the two crocodiles look similar, the ancient species has a different skull and jaw formation from the Nile crocodile.

“There’s this misconception that crocodiles are these living fossils that haven’t changed,” he said. “This is something different, a species of a true crocodile, but different from anything known.”

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Zombie-Ant Fungus Has Its Own Killer Fungus
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, May 7, 2012

Like something out of a horror movie, the zombie-ant fungus attacks and invades the brains of carpenter ants. Possessed ants march to their death, and the fungus lives inside the exoskeleton.

Now, a new study reports that the zombie-ant fungus itself faces attack by another fungus.

This secondary attacker, a white fungus, is “looking for its own lunch, and it thinks this dead ant is a nice thing to eat, along with the fungus that’s eating the ant,” said David Hughes, a disease biologist at Penn State and one of the authors.

This attack prevents the spores of the zombie-ant fungus from spreading and infecting other ants in the colony, Dr. Hughes said.

“Looking at the colony, it’s a good thing for the ants,” he said. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

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