A weekly round-up of local science-related research/news/issues, offered up for discussion. Feel free to comment, or let us know what else you’ve been reading or studying this week.

SIO scientists use really old ice from Antarctica to study climate change. This week the Union-Tribune profiled a group at SIO, led by prominent climatologist Dr. Jeff Severinghaus and Research Associate Ross Beaudette, as they await a delivery of some very special ice from a national depository in Denver. The ice was extracted from Antarctica last winter in a massive undertaking by a team of dedicated researchers from all over the country (including some from SIO). It was then shipped to L.A., driven by truck to Denver, and will now be delivered via FedEx to the lab in La Jolla. There, atmospheric bubbles trapped in the ice for thousands and thousands of years will allow the scientists to track fluctuations in greenhouse gases over time. Then they can compare prehistoric greenhouse gas composition and global temperatures to come up with a better understanding of how the two are connected.

UCSD and San Diego City College students place in the top half at competition of unmanned vehicles. The San Diego iBotics team, at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering, placed 11th out of 25 teams in a competition sponsored by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. Since this year’s theme was “underwater”, they built a carbon fiber vehicle that resembled a stingray. It might not have been the best at making its way through an underwater obstacle course, but the robotic stingray won high marks for its aesthetic value. A team from San Diego City College also placed 10th in the annual competition, which took place at the Naval Warfare System Center’s TRANSDEC Facility in Point Loma.

SDSU researchers show how anthrax shuts down the host immune response and causes meningitis, while at UCSD, scientist reveal how streptococcal bacteria suppress the immune system. Using a non-infectious strain, scientists at SDSU discovered that anthrax uses its secreted toxin to dampen the natural immune response that bacteria usually encounter when they meet the blood-brain barrier, a specialized layer of blood vessel cells that keep bad things in the blood from entering the central nervous system. More specifically, 87% of the genes normally expressed by these cells were suppressed when exposed to anthrax. Some of these included the cytokines that are necessary for calling neutrophils to the site of infection. Without this response, the anthrax bacteria are free to replicate and spread into the brain, eventually leading to meningitis. The study appeared last Wednesday in PLoS One.

Also this week, in Cell Host & Microbe, UCSD researchers showed that streptococcal bacteria, the kind that cause of ‘strep throat’ and other infections, take a slightly different approach to preventing clearance by the immune system. These bacteria express an enzyme that degrades IL-8, one of the cytokines that recruits neutrophils, after it is expressed. Like anthrax, the strep are then better able to replicate, survive, and cause disease.