biology
omnibrain | April 30, 2007Last week Migraines were good for fending off memory loss in middle age people. Now this week migraines are causing brain damage that potentially can lead to strokes. Pretty fair trade off eh?! Better memory for a horribly disabling stroke that might destroy your memory anyway (well... or kill you)!
Alright... here's the details:
The research, which was done in mice, also suggests giving oxygen may help reduce the damage, said Takahiro Takano, Maiken Nedergaard and colleagues at the University of Rochester in New York, working with a team at the Danish pharmaceutical group Novo Nordisk.…
evolgen | April 30, 2007Dr. Doris Haggis-on-Whey and her husband Benny, as part of their H-O-W series of books, have produced an absolutely dispensable piece of misinformation, the third in a series of we can only hope not too many, ineloquently titled Animals of the Ocean: In Particular the Giant Squid. They claim that their World of Unbelievable Brilliance series, of which Animals of the Ocean is the third in a series of we can only hope . . . um, they claim that their series . . . well, I don't really know what they claim, because they never get around to it.
Dr. and Mr. Haggis-on-Whey are neither not biologists…
tfk | April 29, 2007While many things about the promos for "Starter Wife" bother me (the plot and the cast, for starters), I find myself simply confused by a scene in which Debra Messing's husband opens his robe and she reacts with disgust. All we can see is his hairy chest, though it's possible she's reacting to something off-screen.
I fail to understand how a certain amount of hair on a man's body is supposed to be a bad thing. Everything from The 40-Year-Old Virgin to Queer Eye suggests that men ought to be hairless. Can anyone think of another prominent secondary sexual characteristic which people…
hrynyshyn | April 28, 2007Get ready for a big fracas among oncologists: "In June, U.S. researchers will announce the first direct link between cancer prevention and the sunshine vitamin. Their results are nothing short of astounding." (Globe and Mail, April 28). A lot of people are going to find this hard to swallow.
More the Globe's Martin Mittelstaedt:
A four-year clinical trial involving 1,200 women found those taking the vitamin had about a 60-per-cent reduction in cancer incidence, compared with those who didn't take it, a drop so large -- twice the impact on cancer attributed to smoking -- it almost looks like a…
evolgen | April 26, 2007Ever wonder what biobloggers are blogging about on their blogs? Here's what:
Razib posts part of a paper by Jerry Coyne and others (which I can't seem to track down) which questions the role cis regulatory elements play in adaptive phenotypic evolution. This all part of Coyne's war on evo-devo.
Another post at GNXP (this one by p-ter) describes a polymorphic deletion that is associated with resistance to retroviral infection. P-ter tries to throw me a bone by mentioning the relevance of Drosophila research, but ends up shooting himself in the foot (how's that for mixed metaphors?).
Orac's…
grrlscientist | April 25, 2007tags: Solomon Islands Frogmouth, Rigidipenna inexpectatus, Podargus ocellatus inexpectatus, birds, birding, ornithology
Gone are the days when animals were classified to taxon based solely on bone structure (osteology), body structure (morphometrics) or behavior (ethology), or some combination of these characters. Currently, scientists have a suite of powerful tools for classifying creatures to taxon, and analyses using a combination of these methods is allowing us to come to a deeper understanding of all animal life. As a result of using these techniques, a new species of bird has been…
moleculeoftheday | April 25, 2007Aqueous bio-compatible reducing agents are legion, but people end up using the same ones over and over. Probably the least used is TCEP (which doesn't stink at all), next is dithiothreitol (and the related but slightly less effective dithioerythritol), which stinks, but not too badly. Perversely, biologists usually seem to end up using beta-mercaptoethanol, which is the stinkiest of the lot.
BME stinks, but not too badly - the burnt rubber smell has a pleasant organic alcohol note in the background, making it not such a miserable smell. Uninitiated coworkers might disagree.
Certain synthetic…
moleculeoftheday | April 24, 2007Yesterday's entry on Dithiothreitol garnered one lone comment. Remarking on the smell. True enough; it's a thiol - where there's sulfur, there's often stink. There is a biologically compatible reducing agent that doesn't stink at all: tris(carboxyethyl)phosphine, or TCEP.
It's usually sold as the hydrochloride salt. Interestingly, phosphines almost always stink too, but TCEP is nonvolatile, since it's charged. It's oxidized to the phosphine oxide (which are often quite insoluble, but the charges save you again here):
I've never actually used TCEP, but I've had a bottle of it in the fridge…
hrynyshyn | April 24, 2007Time was when any mention of members of the order Hymenoptera referred to the prospect of killer bees stinging their way up through America. Not anymore. Today it's the other way around. Bee hives are collapsing left, right and center, and not just this side of the Atlantic. And no one is quite sure why. Among the strangest hypotheses is one that blames cell phone radiation, believe it or not. See here, and here for discussion elsewhere on ScienceBlogs in response to a story across the pond in the Independent. I just want to point out the curious fact that...
today's Science Times section…
omnibrain | April 24, 2007We all know the basic characteristics of a happy dog (well at least pizza guys and mail men know),
Ears close to the head, tense posture, and tail straight out from the body means "don't mess with me." Ears perked up, wriggly body and vigorously wagging tail means "I am sooo happy to see you!"
An article in todays NYT highlights a brand new discovery in doggy linguistics,
When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left.
I might even read the…
moleculeoftheday | April 23, 2007The environment within a cell is actually rather reducing, this is evidenced by the free cysteine found in some proteins. Many proteins require a free cysteine to operate properly, and once they're outside the cell, they can easily become oxidized. Enzymologists have had to deal with this for some time since we started taking oxidizable stuff out of cells. Just over 40 years ago, Cleland realized that dithiothreitol would probably work pretty well for this.
Using thiols for a reducing agent is a common strategy; the idea is you dissolve much more reducing agent than protein (often in 1,000-…
evolgen | April 20, 2007
The boys at Deep Sea News are wrapping up their Megavertebrate Week in which they profile various charismatic animals with backbones that live in the sea (including seals). Go check out their site for other cool pictures and stories about swimming with sharks. For those of you who like spotting critters in the field, Jeremy at the Voltage Gate has the thing for you: the first ever Blogger Bioblitz. If you enjoy identifying organisms in the wild, sign up, observe, and report back what you see. And, if you live by the ocean, you may even spot a seal.
evolgen | April 19, 2007There are two cool articles on two related topics, but the articles themselves don't deal with the area in which these topic overlap. Confused? Here's a quick description of the two articles:
One article is on the change in fecundity cost of Wolbachia infections in a population of Drosophila simulans. Wolbachia are bacterial symbionts which can do all kinds of cool stuff to their hosts, including preventing infected males from mating with uninfected females (cytoplasmic incompatibility) and causing male zygotes to die before fully developing (male killing). Wolbachia can really do a number on…
omnibrain | April 19, 2007Ok... not really but there is a great article in The Onion about some out of work scientists. Here's a snippet:
The team recently managed to secure a New Jersey state research subsidy of $2.55 by returning the empties.
McCarthy provided his Shar-Pei, Wrinkles, to serve as a control. Wrinkles was only given water to drink, though the team had to scrap one set of data due to confounding variables introduced when the control subject consumed 7.35 ounces of beer when the scientists' backs were turned.
...
Rogers and his team said they will continue their work in the burgeoning field of dog-…
tfk | April 18, 2007Ask a ScienceBlogger took a vacation a little while back, but it's back now in a new form. The last installment was hosted at Cognitive Daily, and now Thoughts from Kansas gets to answer this pressing query: "How did kissing evolve? Are humans the only primates who kiss? Why do we?"
Setting aside the rather obvious proximate answer to the final question, it turns out that these questions are largely unresolved. The origin of kissing isn't clear, in part because kissing encompasses a range of behaviors. Kissing a baby, pecking your friend's cheek in greeting and locking lips with a loved one…
evolgen | April 17, 2007A lot of interesting evolutionary genetics research gets published, and I don't have time to write an insightful commentary on all of it (some may argue that I have never written an insightful commentary on anything). Here's a brief overview of the stuff I have missed in the past few weeks:
A population of sheep was started with the introduction of two individuals on a remote island in the southern region of the Indian Ocean. Surprisingly, genetic diversity has increased over time in this population (reported here). This increase in heterozygosity (measured by the amount of microsatellite…
jstemwedel | April 17, 2007Friend of the blog LO alerted me to The Great Turtle Race, wherein a passel of leatherback sea turtles "race" from Playa Grande in Costa Rica to the Galapagos Islands. The linked website it tracking the turtles via satellite, so you can watch their progress and root for your favorite. (I'm pulling for Stephanie Colburtle, "an intensely patriotic turtle who can fly through the water like an eagle".) There is also information there about leatherback sea turtle populations and ways you can help protect them.
tfk | April 17, 2007The LA Times won the explanatory reporting prize for a 5 part series on ocean pollution:
The five-part "Altered Oceans" project, headed by environmental reporter Kenneth R. Weiss, revealed how mankind has choked the oceans with trash, nitrogen, carbon and other pollutants — killing sea life, making some coastal residents sick and effectively turning evolution back to a primeval epoch when primitive organisms reigned.
Reporter Usha Lee McFarling and photographer Rick Loomis teamed with Weiss to create the stories, photo galleries, animated graphics and videos (posted at latimes.com/oceans)…
evolgen | April 13, 2007Science has published two papers on Tyrannosaurus rex proteins (are we in the golden age of dino molecular biology?). In one paper, the authors report that they extracted proteins from T. rex soft tissue that was preserved for millions of years. In the other paper, some of the same researchers write about how they used mass spectrometry to determine the sequences of proteins obtained from a 68 million year old T. rex fossil and a mastodon that died hundreds of thousands of years ago. But the title of the paper is:
Protein Sequences from Mastodon and Tyrannosaurus Rex Revealed by Mass…
hrynyshyn | April 13, 2007This is scary: The Independent has a story on research that hints at a way for women to produce their own sperm, from their bone marrow, and thereby take men out of the reproductive cycle entirely. Yikes.
The study reportedly appears in the journal Reproduction: Gamete Biology, and although I can't find it yet, Karim Nayernia of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne has been working and publishing on this sort of thing for a while, having already found that male gametes derived from embryonic stem-cells in male mice can give rise to viable offspring. Now Nayernia's team has done it in female…