MHC
sa smith | May 7, 2013I cannot deal with the fact Tasmanian Devils are being driven to extinction by a contagious, untreatable cancer. I cannot deal with it. Click on the first link to see the science behind the tragedy:
Numbers arent enough
Click on the second link to see why I cannot deal with this, psychologically:
Oh no… Cedric died.
I am crying remembering Cedric... I saw him as Arnies brother-from-down-under... crap...
Anne-Marie Hodge from Endless Forms just wrote about new findings about Tasmanian Devils and their cancer:
Devil Dispatch: MHC the Key to Contagious Cancer Vaccine?
I took away another idea:…
sa smith | September 1, 2010Oh no...
Im genuinely crying over this.
Cedric the Tasmanian Devil died.
Here is the obvious reason for why I loved Cedric:
But I loved Cedric for scientific reasons too. I thought he was going to help us save Tasmanian Devils from extinction.
Dr. Alex Kreiss is the cute boy in that pic.Dr Kreiss says it was a difficult day.
"We would see and do something with Cedric every week so it was a very sad day and not just for me but for the keepers that looked after him since he was born, for the other vets that worked with him and that did health checks with him. So it was very sad."
University of…
sa smith | May 10, 2010My first tech job out of college, I worked with a lovely group of Chinese ladies. They gave me a Chinese nick-name meaning: dog nose.
Im working under the assumption that this wasnt an Anti-Semitic thing (lol!), but a comment on my really sensitive sense of smell. I would walk into the lab, smell gas, and be like "OMFG DID SOMEONE LEAVE THE GAS ON??" and they were like "Um, we had it on like 30 minutes ago..."
I hate cologne and perfumes. They literally make me ill (either sick to my stomach, if I can run away, or a migraine if I cant escape).
But I love, love, love the smell of a sweaty…
razib | May 25, 2009Dienekes points me to new research on MHC and mating:
The scientists studied MHC data from 90 married couples, and compared them with 152 randomly-generated control couples. They counted the number of MHC dissimilarities among those who were real couples, and compared them with those in the randomly-generated 'virtual couples'. "If MHC genes did not influence mate selection", says Professor Bicalho, "we would have expected to see similar results from both sets of couples. But we found that the real partners had significantly more MHC dissimilarities than we could have expected to find simply…