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POPSSex is the ultimate absurdity Isn't it ironic that we all suffer today the consequences of how single celled organisms that lived a billion years ago choose to procreate? :-)
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POPSGaia's evil twin: Is life its own worst enemy? Recent interesting research shows that life on earth may have distinct suicidal inclinations. Human destruction of the environment is but the most recent episode. If true it has interesting implication on forming of exobiological theories, and the evolution of civilizations outside our precious planet.
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POPSThe Immaculate Designer Prosthesis Human morphology is not only matter of biology it is also a matter of fashion. Atztecs had a practice of reshaping their skulls. Chinese were reshaping females' feet. This is only the next step
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POPSA Most Private Evolution Trying to understand counterintuitive sexual parts and habits follows in the best of scientific traditions. As Charles Darwin worked on evolution, he pondered male phenomena that looked useless, or even harmful, for surviving. Outsized horns on male beetles puzzled him, as did male birds with gorgeous plumage. Out of this consternation came his insight into a process he called sexual selection, which he distinguished from natural selection. There may be survival of the fittest, but there’s also survival of the sexiest. “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!” Darwin wrote in a letter to the botanist Asa Gray, albeit in a whimsical paragraph. Nauseated or not, Darwin was willing to step beyond survival of the fittest.
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POPSDistorted Body Images: A Quick and Easy Way to Reduce Pain
For the study, Lorimer Moseley of Oxford University and his colleagues recruited 10 participants, all of whom suffer from chronic pain in their right arm. The participants were asked to perform a set of movements with their right arm, under different conditions. In one condition, they observed their limb through a pair of binoculars, which magnified their hand to twice its normal size; in another, the binoculars were inverted so that their hands appeared smaller than they actually were. As they performed the arm movements, the participants were asked to rate the amount of pain they experienced. Each one reported that the pain they felt became markedly worse when they moved their limb. Surprisingly though, every participant also reported that the extent to which their pain increased depended on how their vision had been manipulated. They reported the greatest increase in pain when they saw a magnified view of their hand, and the smallest increase when their hands were minified.
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POPSAmoebas turn to family during tough times It is absolutely fascinating how certain patterns which we tend to associate with very high levels of complexity and organization, are present in very simple organisms and serve in fact the primordial imperative of survival.
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POPS'Supermice' who can resist cancer and age almost half as fast as normal In the latest study, published in the journal Cell, the scientists solved that problem by changing the genes of the mice first to make them resistant to the disease. The researchers found that mice which had been created in this way had better muscle in old age, healthier skin tissue and fewer digestion problems. "By simultaneously increasing the amounts of telomerase and the resistance to cancer we are able to delay ageing in mice and also to extend their life span by 40 per cent," said Maria A. Blasco, from the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), who carried out the study with colleagues from Valencia University. "These mice get to live for as long as the eldest mice in records of the same kind. "If we were to parallel it to humans, then it would mean reaching 120 years of age and also to start ageing much later in life."
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POPSThe Promise and Power of RNA RNA interference, or RNAi, discovered only about 10 years ago, is attracting huge interest for its seeming ability to knock out disease-causing genes. There are already at least six RNAi drugs being tested in people, for illnesses including cancer and an eye disease. And while there are still huge challenges to surmount, that number could easily double in the coming year. “I’ve never found a gene that couldn’t be down-regulated by RNAi,” said Tod Woolf, president of RXi Pharmaceuticals, one of the many companies that have sprung up in the last few years to pursue RNA-based medicines. The two scientists credited with discovering the basic mechanism of RNA interference won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2006, only eight years after publishing their seminal paper. And three scientists credited with discovering the closely related micro-RNA in the 1990s won Lasker Awards for medical research this year.
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POPSThe Wonders of Blood Blood is the one tissue that comes into contact with every other tissue of the body, and it is through blood that our disparate parts communicate, through blood that our organs cooperate. Without a circulatory system, there would be no internal civilization, no means of ensuring orderly devotion to the common cause that is us. “It’s an enormous communications network,” Dr. Schafer said — the original cellphone system, if you will, 100 trillion users strong. Blood can also be thought of as a private ocean, a recapitulation of what life was like for all the years we spent drifting as microscopic, single-celled organisms, “taking up nutrients from sea water and then eliminating waste products back into sea water,” Dr. Schafer said. Not only is blood mostly water, but the watery portion of blood, the plasma, has a concentration of salt and other ions that is remarkably similar to sea water. Keep reading.
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POPSWaste From Gut Bacteria Helps Host Control Weight Humans, like other animals, have a large and varied population of beneficial bacteria that live in the intestines. The bacteria break up large molecules that the host cannot digest. The host in turn absorbs many of the resulting small molecules for energy and nutrients. "The number of bacteria in our gut far exceeds the total number of cells in our bodies," said Dr. Yanagisawa. "It's truly a mutually beneficial relationship. We provide the bacteria with food, and in return they supply energy and nutrients," he explained.
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POPSSingle Species Ecosystem Gives Hope For Life on Other Planets Scientists extracted all of the DNA present within 5,600 liters of fluid from a fracture deep within the mine. Expecting to find a mix of species within the fluid, the researchers were surprised to find that 99.9% of the DNA belonged to one bacterium, a new species. The remaining DNA was contamination from the mine and the laboratory. A community of a single species is almost unheard of in the microbial world. But this little bacteria has been happily living on its own and seems to have all of the genetic machinery to enable it to survive independently. Since it is the only species in the ecosystem, it must extract everything it needs from an otherwise dead environment.
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POPSDon't Stress! Bacterial Cell's 'Crisis Command Center' Revealed If a bacteria cell finds itself in a dangerous situation - for example, if the temperature or saltiness of the bacteria's environment reach dangerous levels which threaten the survival of the bacteria -a warning signal from the cell's surface is transmitted into the cell. Using cutting edge electron microscopy imaging techniques the authors of the new research observed that the stressosomes receive this warning signal, and in response several proteins called RSBT break away from the large stressosome. This breakaway triggers a cascade of signals within the cell which results in over 150 proteins being produced - proteins which enable the cell to adapt, react and survive in its new environment.
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POPS68 Molecules that hold the key to all Cellular Life Currently, the vast majority of medical research looks to the human genome and proteome for answers, but those answers remain elusive, and perhaps for good reason. “We have now found instances where the pathogenesis of widespread and chronic diseases can be attributed to a change in the glycome, for example, in the absence of definable changes in the genome or proteome,” Marth said, adding that, as biomedical researchers, “we need to begin to cultivate the integration of disciplines in a holistic and rigorous way in order to perceive and most effectively manipulate the biological mechanisms of health and disease.” Marth believes that biology should become more integrative both in academic and research settings. “I’m one who believes that we don’t need to sacrifice breadth of knowledge in order to acquire depth of understanding.”
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POPSScientists find the secret to swatting flies Handily, the research suggests an optimal method for successfully swatting a fly. "It is best not to swat at the fly's starting position, but rather to aim a bit forward of that to anticipate where the fly is going to jump when it first sees your swatter,"
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POPSResearchers turn one form of adult mouse cell directly into another Joan Brugge, Chair of the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School, said the new study "provides exciting new insights into yet another aspect of cell plasticity that was not appreciated previously and that offers great potential therapeutically. Direct reprogramming represents a more straight-forward strategy to treat diseases involving loss of function of specific cell populations than approaches requiring an intermediate embryonic stem cell," she said.
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POPSFuture for clean energy lies in 'big bang' of evolution For humans now there is the tantalising possibility of tweaking the photosynthetic reactions of cyanobacteria to produce fuels we want such as hydrogen, alcohols or even hydrocarbons, rather than carbohydrates. Progress at the research level has been rapid, boosting prospects of harnessing photosynthesis not just for energy but also for manufacturing valuable compounds for the chemical and biotechnology industries. Such research is running on two tracks, one aimed at genetically engineering real plants and cyanobacteria to yield the products we want, and the other to mimic their processes in artificial photosynthetic systems built with human-made components. Both approaches hold great promise and will be pursued in parallel, as was discussed at a recent workshop focusing on the photosynthetic reaction centres of cyanobacteria, organised by the European Science Foundation (ESF).
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POPSPioneering Research in Neuromorphic Electronics that Function Like the Biological Brain The HRL team's ultimate goal is to build a low-power, compact electronic chip combining a novel analog circuit design and a neuroscience-inspired architecture that can address a wide range of cognitive abilities--perception, planning, decision making, and motor control. In the initial two phases of the SyNAPSE program, the team will translate the neuronal and synaptic functions of the biological cortex into similar microelectronic functions.
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POPSThe Secret Of Fast Complex Brain Restructuring Up to now, it had been assumed that nerve cells can only exchange information via the synapses which are special contact points. However, synapses require up to two days to become fully functional - a waste of time and energy if the contact is to be broken down again. The brain could take almost 1000 years to develop if a synapse had to mature at each cell contact. It appears that nerve cells can also obtain information about their neighbours even without a synapse. Neurobiologists Christian Lohmann and Tobias Bonhoeffer from the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology have now explained how they do that. The secret to how the information is exchanged: local calcium signals very quickly transmit all the necessary information to the cell. A synapse only actually develops when the cell and the contact point prove to be suitable candidates for long-term contact.
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POPSOn Law and Neuroscience An interesting read describing the influence of evolution theory and neuroscience on basic legal and moral concepts such as responsibility and free will.
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POPSExploding chromosomes fuel research about evolution of genetic storage Dinoflagellates are stuffed at the core with tightly compacted chromosomes, yet these organisms contain neither histones nor nucleosomes. "What takes care of neutralizing DNA, to allow chromosomes to condense?" Levi-Setti asked. "Most biology books do not tell you." Other scientists had already identified positively charged atoms called cations as neutralizing factors. They found that dinoflagellate chromosomes explode upon the removal of calcium and magnesium cations. Levi-Setti has produced the first images of the distribution of these cations in dinoflagellate chromosomes. These images verify that cations, mainly of calcium and magnesium, neutralize DNA's enormous negative charge, and further suggest a critical role in folding the protein as well. The finding raises questions about the evolution of chromosomes, Rizzo said. "Did dinoflagellates once have histones and then lost them? Or did dinoflagellates never have histones and just 'figured out' a different way to fold lar
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POPSTransformers - The Nature of Alien Life The driving factor is a pragmatic desire to improve mental capacity. Alien beings may have already reached a point in their evolution where, having exhausted the potential of their biological brains, they have taken the next logical step and opted for robotic brains equipped with artificial intelligence. This brain swap may not be as far off for humans as one might think. In only a few decades, the computer revolution here on Earth has produced supercomputers capable of performing more than a quadrillion calculations per second. According to research by Hans Moravec, an artificial-intelligence expert at Carnegie Mellon University, that rate trumps the human brain’s estimated top speed of 100 trillion calculations per second. Some scientists speculate that in a few decades, an event called the technological singularity will occur, and machines armed with computer brains will become sentient and surpass human intelligence. Civilizations equipped with technology light-years ahead
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POPSCooking and Cognition: How Humans Got So Smart We started innovating. We tried different materials, such as bone, and invented many new tools, including needles for beadwork. Responding to, presumably, our first abstract thoughts, we started creating art and maybe even religion. To understand what caused the cognitive spurt, Khaitovich and colleagues examined chemical brain processes known to have changed in the past 200,000 years. Comparing apes and humans, they found the most robust differences were for processes involved in energy metabolism. The finding suggests that increased access to calories spurred our cognitive advances, said Khaitovich, carefully adding that definitive claims of causation are premature. The research is detailed in the August 2008 issue of Genome Biology.
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