clock | July 8, 2009 This February 06, 2005 post describes the basic elements of the circadian system in mammals.
The principal mammalian circadian pacemaker is located in the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN) of the hypothalamus. The general area was first discovered in 1948 by Curt Richter who systematically lesioned a number of endocrine glands and brain areas in rats. The only time he saw an effect on circadian rhythms was when he lesioned a frontal part of hypothalamus (which is at the base of the brain) immediatelly above the optic chiasm (the spot where two optic nerves cross). Later studies in the 1970s…
clock | July 7, 2009Man is always more than he can know of himself; consequently, his accomplishments, time and again, will come as a surprise to him.
- Golo Mann
clock | July 7, 2009There have been 19 new articles Monday night and 11 new articles Tuesday night in PLoS ONE. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Sex Is Always Well Worth Its Two-Fold Cost:
Sex is considered as an evolutionary paradox, since its positive contribution to Darwinian fitness remains…
clock | July 7, 2009
If you really read this blog 'for the articles', you know some of my recurrent themes, e.g., that almost every biological function exhibits cycles and that almost every cell in every organism contains a more-or-less functioning clock. Here is a new paper that combines both of those themes very nicely, but I'll start with a little bit of background first.
Daily Rhythms in Sensory Sensitivity
If almost every biochemical, physiological and behavioral function exhibits daily cycles, it is no surprise that such rhythms have been discovered in sensory sensitivity of many sensory modalities -…
clock | July 7, 2009I gave a talk about Open Access at the University Library in Belgrade yesterday (listen to the audio here and see some pictures here).
I was just on TV a couple of hours ago, on Studio B - I talk fast so I had time to promote PLoS, Open Access, blogs and tomorrow's lecture at Oncology Center at the University of Belgrade in just about 5 minutes on air. This was also probably a rare mention of Twitter and likely the very first mention of FriendFeed in Serbian media. I was wearing a PLoS ONE t-shirt which one of the anchors pointed out ;-)
I am about to on the radio (Radio Belgrade 1) where…
clock | July 7, 2009As you may have noticed, I am quite fascinated with the earliest beginnings of my scientific discipline, which was almost entirely involving research on plants. The most famous story from that early period is the construction of a Flower Clock by Karl Linne, the father of taxonomy.
So, of course I got really exited when I saw, on the Mainau island last Friday, a reconstructed Linnaeus' floral clock.
Then I looked carefully - and noticed it was not telling the correct time. This was taken at 3pm.
So I thought about it for a second....and, well, this is what I think is going on here.
First…
clock | July 7, 2009The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January.
Today, I asked Katherine Haxton of the Endless Possibilities blog (see the archives of her Nature Network blog here), to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
Hello! I'm Katherine and I'm a chemist.…
clock | July 7, 2009This post from February 03, 2005 covers the basic concepts and terms on entrainment. This is also the only blog post to date that I am aware of that was cited in a scientific paper.
Let's now continue our series of Clock Tutorials with an introduction to some phenomena (and related terms and concepts) observed in the laboratory in the course of doing standard circadian experiments. Such experiments usually involve either the study of properties of freerunning rhythms (check the old tutorials, especially CT2 and CT 4 for clarification of basic terms and concepts), or the analysis of…
clock | July 7, 2009On the way back from the Mainau island to Lindau island, we were entertained on the ship by a balloon magician. He started out with balloon molecules. Kind of a nifty way to demonstrate why you can write with graphite and not with a diamond.
I am not sure the magician was aware that Dr.Kroto was sitting in the front row when he produced the bucky-ball (for which Kroto got his Nobel) but it worked out great in the end.
But it got suspicious when the guy switched to making balloon plants and animals. Could it be? Is that a balloon magician or Stuart Pivar disguised as a balloon magician?…
clock | July 6, 2009We need time to dream, time to remember, and time to reach the infinite. Time to be.
- Gladys Taber
clock | July 6, 2009You probably realize by now that my expertise is in clocks and calendars of birds, but blogging audience forces me to occasionally look into human clocks from a medical perspective. Reprinted below the fold are three old Circadiana posts about the connection between circadian clocks and the bipolar disorder, the third one being the longest and most involved. Here are the links to the original posts if you want to check the comments (especially the first comment on the third post):
January 18, 2005: Clocks and Bipolar Disorder
August 16, 2005: Bipolar? Avoid night shift
February 19, 2006:…
clock | July 6, 2009Ashutosh Jogalekar wrote the best summary of the panel on Climate Change held on the island of Mainau on the last day of the Lindau Nobel Meeting:
clock | July 6, 2009Scientia Pro Publica #7 is up on Greg Laden's blog
Carnival of the Green #187 is up on Plant a Tree USAâ¢
Carnival of the Liberals #94 is up on Submitted To A Candid World
clock | July 6, 2009A couple of German bloggers and I went to see the Butterfly House on the Island of Mainau. They had good cameras with lenses that allowed them to take extreme close-ups. I had to do with a little pocket camera, but a few pictures turned out decent enough to show:
clock | July 6, 2009Here are some more pictures from the domestic and wild animal life on the island:
clock | July 6, 2009The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January.
Today, I asked Miriam Goldstein of the Oyster's Garter blog to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
I am a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. I write…
clock | July 6, 2009
I wrote this post back on February 02, 2005 in order to drive home the point that the circadian clock is not a single organ, but an organ system comprised of all cells in the body linked in a hierarchical manner:
In the earliest days of chronobiology, the notion of circadian organization was quite simple. Somewhere inside the organism there was a clock. It was entrained by light via photoreceptors (e.g., the eye) and it drove the rhythms of various biochemical, physiological and behavioral events in the body:
Very soon this simple notion became difficult to sustain in light of new data.…
clock | July 5, 2009A brief interview with one of the young researchers attending the Lindau Nobel conference - Jennifer Murphy from the University of California, Los Angeles, USA
clock | July 5, 2009Once upon a time a man dragged his father from their house and as they reached a tree his father cried Stop! I did not drag my own father past this tree!
- Gertrude Stein
clock | July 5, 2009A brief interview with one of the young researchers attending the Lindau Nobel conference - Ghada Al-Kadamany from Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany