Hydra Cancer, Putting Stuff in Orbit, and A Book by Bill Bryson

 Today I learned:
1) A bit of a puzzle regarding cancer. See, the genes for cancer, used by cancer and probably required for cancer emerged around the time that multicellularity evolved. This is probably not a coincidence — cancer can’t really be said to happen until there’s a multicellular organism, after all. So we expect cancer to go back to the first multicellular organisms, including sponges and jellyfish. Here’s the puzzle — as far as I know, we’ve never observed a tumor in a sponge. I’m not sure about jellyfish, though hydra *have* been observed with tumors. How do you identify a tumor in a hydra? It could be difficult to tell a tumor from a natural and beneficial but rare growth, after all. In this case, the alleged “tumors” were a) unusual growths b) displaying phenotypes of reproductive structures far from where they usually occur c) with unusual gene expression profiles similar to (though distinct from) tumors in mammals d) capable of being transplanted to other parts of the hydra and spreading throughout the body that e) reduced the fitness of the host. Sounds like cancer to me.

2) It costs somewhere around $25,000 to put a kilogram of material into geosynchronous orbit, and about half as much to put a kilogram of material into low earth orbit. (that’s the market marginal cost per kilogram, not the total cost.)

3) The word “seafood” and the term “dirt road” were invented in America, and spread from there to England and other English-speaking countries. In fact, I’ve been learning about dozens and dozens of such word-spreadings from Bill Bryson’s “The Mother Tongue: English and how it got to be that way”, but those two really stuck with me for some reason. Other little tidbits from that book — the crossword was called a word-cross by its inventor, and crossword puzzles were spurned by major publishers as crass for many decades after their invention (eventually they gave in because they were super-popular).