What Is It About Emily?

What is it about Emily? She's so happily, totally into dead things. She's got this T-shirt that says "Everything Is Dead"; she's the host of a video series on YouTube called The Brain Scoop, and that's where I saw her the other day, driving around Montana looking for a frozen wolf carcass. The wolf had been hit by a car. In this YouTube episode, she isn't sure about the pickup address, so she pulls out her cellphone and by mistake calls LensCrafters, the eyeglass store, and she says, "Hi ... I'm on my way to pick up a wolf that Liz said she was holding for us." There's a pause. "A wolf," she says, more quietly. "It's in the freezer." Another pause. Then, "Oh ... sorry."

Sipping Alcohol

Emily Graslie is a volunteer curatorial assistant at the Philip L. Wright Zoological Museum at the University of Montana — which means when she's not taking photos, baking or playing the violin, she's skinning wolves, dissecting or watching beetle larvae eat the dead muscle off a bear skull. She's got these sassy beetle-shaped earrings, and when she's sitting in the museum basement surrounded by jars and jars and jars of dead slugs, turtles, bats, pack rats, fish (including a two-headed one), an elk embryo and a shark, she makes me want to crawl through the screen and sit right next to her because she's having so much fun. (She has real friends, of course, live ones, museum associates and her boss, Dave Dyer, who is briefly seen sipping from an alcohol jar jammed with what look like preserved rodents.) I'll say this for Missoula biologists — they know how to have fun.

So check Emily out — this is her inspection tour of the museum's storage room, where you learn about exploding lead jars that have sharks in them.

A word about Emily's earrings. For reasons not entirely clear to me, people find it unpleasant to see beetles, wasps or ants hanging off other people's ears, but Emily, in this and many other things, is a pioneer. Her oversized beetle earrings are her way of saying bugs can be beautiful, even when they are three inches from one's mouth. She's celebrating biodiversity.

Which gives me the chance to mention other bold forays into insect-inspired fashion, like this elegant carryall from Japan, called the Backpack Mega-cockroach. It would take a brave soul to wear one of these in a subway or bus. I don't know how you open it, there must be a zipper somewhere, but somehow, I'd rather not look to closely.

And, in a very different vein, here are some insects and spiders — little jewels — from Justin Gershenson-Gates of A Mechanical Mind in Chicago. "I take dead old watches," he says, "disassemble and clean them, then rearrange their bits and widgets into whimsical designs." These bugs are extraordinarily beautiful, probably because you can sense that they were once the innards of old timepieces. I especially like the spiders with light bulbs.

Courtesy of Justin Gershenson-Gates

These critters are so fabulous, I can imagine Emily's museum creating a special cabinet to house them, with elaborate scientific names and brief descriptors like "Highly Evolved 'Bulb-Spiders' Found Hiding In Reading Lamps."

Because Justin "found" them, they'd all carry his name, Archaearanea justingershon-gatesiorum. But the wildlife videos, describing their mating habits? They'd all be done by Emily.

I didn't know this until my editor, Andrew, mentioned it, but Emily's sister, Serri, is an NPR employee. Andrew tells me she's Emily's older sister, which probably means the earrings she wears, if she wears any, are a touch more conservative. But in the interest of journalistic transparency, you should know we have a Graslie in the house.

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Pig Manure Reveals More Reason To Worry About Antibiotics

Pigs at a farm in Beijing peer out at visitors. Half of all the pigs in the world live in China.

Ng Han Guan/AP Pigs at a farm in Beijing peer out at visitors. Half of all the pigs in the world live in China.

Ng Han Guan/AP

There's a global campaign to force meat producers to rein in their use of antibiotics on pigs, chickens and cattle. European countries, especially Denmark and the Netherlands, have taken the lead. The U.S. is moving, haltingly, toward similar restrictions. Now the concerns about rampant antibiotic use appear to have reached China, where meat production and antibiotic use have been growing fast.

Half of all the pigs in the world live in China — a consequence of the country's swelling appetite for pork. And like pork producers in many other countries, Chinese farmers have turned to antibiotics and other feed additives to control disease in their herds and also to make the animals grow faster.

The exact extent of antibiotic use in Chinese agriculture is unknown, because authorities don't monitor it. But researchers have sometimes found disturbingly high levels of antibiotic residues in manure from Chinese pig farms.

A study published Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences adds to evidence that antibiotic use by Chinese pork producers poses health risks. According to the study, manure from pig farms doesn't just contain antibiotic residues. It also carries high concentrations of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics. This increases the risk that antibiotic resistance will move into bacteria that infect humans, and the resulting diseases will be more difficult to treat.

But there's also good news. Scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who took the lead in the new study, are increasingly aware of the problem and looking for ways to fight it. They invited James Tiedje, a microbiologist from Michigan State University, to join their effort.

"They were quite forthcoming," Tiedje tells The Salt.

The Chinese scientists monitored antibiotic residues in manure from three different pig farms. They found plenty, but not at exceptionally high levels.

Tiedje then tested those manure samples, looking for genes that make bacteria resistant to particular antibiotics. That's when he hit the jackpot: He found more than 100 different resistance genes. The concentration of resistance genes was almost 200 times higher in these samples, compared to manure from a pig farm that had never used antibiotics.

"We're not trying to single out the Chinese here. This is a global problem," says Tiedje. Similar levels of antibiotic residues, for instance, have been found in manure on European farms.

The study indicates that treating the manure after it leaves the farm can significantly reduce the potential for this manure to spread antibiotic resistance to other bacteria in the surrounding environment. Composting it, for instance, cuts the total population of microbes in manure – which means fewer microbes carrying antibiotic resistance genes.

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