Hey, you got the fever?

Always one to sniff out a good story, this week Stuart let us in on the facts behind plant pollen allergies and hay fever, otherwise known as allergic rhinitis. Not to mention the horror that is rhinorrhea (that’s actually just the technical term for a runny nose, but it sounds pretty horrific).

Not all plant pollen causes allergic reactions, only that carried by the wind, which usually means you don't even notice the flowers. Shape is often an indicator of how pollen is spread. This pollen is magnified under an electron microscope by about 500x actual size (Photo from Dartmouth Electron Microscope Facility)

Although there’s a tendency to blame wattles and other showy flowers for our pain, those are unlikely to be responsible because they’re pollinated by insects. It’s much more likely to be due to the less obvious, wind-pollinated plants like grasses, that cast their pollen on the air.

To find out which plants cause hay fever and what time of year to avoid them, see the Australian Society of Clinical Immunology and Allergy’s Guide to common allergic pollen.

And for further information on hay fever symptoms and treatment options, check out the Better Health Channel.

Deep, deep science

John, who always likes to seek out extremes, this week dug up the Kola Superdeep Borehole, the deepest hole ever drilled at 12.262 km beneath the Earth.

Although they reached this depth in 1989, drilling actually began 19 years earlier in 1970, when Russia was part of the Soviet Union.

The borehole sits on and under the Kola Peninsula, in Lapland at the very north-west of Russia, and part of Murmansk Oblast (word of the day: oblast, an administrative division or province of Russia and other Slavic countries like Ukraine and Belarus. Present-day Russia has 46 oblasts, as well as various republics and krais, or territories).

Kola Superdeep Borehole, commemorated on the 1987 USSR stamp (Scanned and processed by Mariluna, via Wikimedia Commons)

You can read more about this Russian marvel at Wikipedia.

Bacteria with guts

In this week’s show, Beth discussed a recently published study on how probiotics, the “good bacteria” in your gut, help with digestion, boost the immune system and possibly reduce the risk of cancer: Fukuda S, Toh H, Hase K, Oshima K, Nakanishi Y, Yoshimura K, Tobe T, Clarke JM, Topping DL, Suzuki T, Taylor TD, Itoh K, Kikuchi J, Morita H, Hattori M & Ohno H 2011,”Bifidobacteria can protect from enteropathogenic infection through production of acetate”, Nature, vol. 469, no. 7331, pp. 543-547.

Bifidobacterium adolescentis (Gram staining by Y tambe , via Wikimedia Commons)

This study was a collaboration between Japanese researchers and Australian scientists from the CSIRO. The paper’s Australian co-author, Dr David Topping from CSIRO Food Futures and Preventative Health Flagships, said of the research:

“While protection was shown with probiotic Bifidobacteria, the study showed also that a CSIRO technology being developed in Preventative Health Flagship was also highly effective. This product is a modified starch which delivers specific SCFA to the large bowel and the data confirm that acetic acid was critical for survival of infected animals. The studies offer promise for the development of more effective prebiotic and probiotic foods to assist in infection control.

For more on this study, read the story at ABC Science.