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What Did You Think of The Harry Potter Epilogue? [Spoilers]

tags: Harry Potter spoilers, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, books I have been getting differing viewpoints regarding the epilogue to the last Harry Potter book, so of course, I am asking you all what you thought of it? Did you want the ending to be less syrupy-sweet? Did you want less to be left to the imagination? Are you still worried about George and about Luna? Did the epilogue "not fit" with the overall tone of the last book? Also, did you think that Rowling only killed two of the main characters in the book (depending on how you define "main characters", I think she killed a…

Bush's Nose Continues to Grow as He Tells Yet Another Lie

tags: George Bush, al-queda, politics, political opinion George Bush, who loves to ignore the facts in favor of telling a good fairy tale, denied that al-Qaeda is as strong as it was at the time of the 9/11 attacks. Just as he does with science, Bush ignored recent media coverage of a US intelligence report entitled Al-Qaeda Better Positioned to Strike the West, which claimed that intelligence analysts told Congress on Wednesday that al-Qaeda had created a safe haven in remote parts of Pakistan. In short, the report flatly stated that Al-Qaeda is "considerably operationally stronger than a…

Four Knife Sheath Chapes

Friendly correspondent Peter Woods is working with chapes or ferrules, that is, metal mounts from the ends of knife sheaths or sword scabbards. He has sent me lovely images of these things in the hope that Aard's readers might be able to suggest parallels. Neither of the finds has any solid provenance, and though I believe them to be from north-west Europe and date from the 11th/12th centuries, I've never seen anything quite like them in my work with Scandinavian small finds. Being fragile yet excellently preserved, they're almost certainly grave finds, not metal detector finds from plough…

Paris climate pact sinks coal stocks, lifts renewable energy?

The Graun said In the aftermath of the Paris agreement, shares in coal firms plunged rapidly. Peabody, the world’s largest coal firm, saw stock values drop 12.6%, while Consol Energy holdings was down by 3.3%. That's interesting; one of the things I wondered about the Paris pow-wow was how the markets might take it. But this being economics in the Graun it needs checking; the linked article Paris climate pact sinks coal stocks, lifts renewable energy seems to fit, but we should look closer. See my image. This is a stock in long-term decline, possibly because of the impacts of GW, but not…

The Physicist Trap

Mark Trodden has a post endorsing the BEC videogames at the University of Colordao's Physics 2000 project. These are a bunch of Java applets demonstrating different aspects of the laser cooling and trapping process. I used to link them from my blog on Steelypips, but in the move to ScienceBlogs, I dropped the "Geek Stuff" category of sidebar links. Still, I heartily agree with the recommendation to go try these out. They first put that site up back when I was in grad school, and somebody or another found the link and brought it up on the computer in the lab. If you read through the text, you'…

Fundy Christians: Shut the Fuck Up

... until you have cleaned house and stopped embarrassing yourselves. And by clean house, I mean, take are of this deeply offensive bullshit your people are now spewing out. You have turned a very bad situation into something ten times worse. As background, this comes from a meeting of national level evangelical leaders who got together to decide what to do about Donald Trump. They decided to fully support Trump, and the woman in the video shown here is giving their arguments. I am not making this up. See also: Two Women Say Donald Trump Touched Them Inappropriately Palm Beach Post…

Congressional Oaths Prior to Testifying

This morning, Attorney General Gonzales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the NSA wiretap program. The Republicans on the committee refused to swear him in under oath, which was requested by the Democrats. This is the second time that I'm aware of that this has happened recently. A few months ago, when a group of oil company executives testified, the same thing happened - the Democrats said that witnesses should be sworn in like always and pledge to tell the truth and the Republicans refused to do so. What I'd like to know is how unusual this is. What are the Senate…

Ask Ethan: What happens when a black hole's singularity evaporates? (Synopsis)

"My discovery that black holes emit radiation raised serious problems of consistency with the rest of physics. I have now resolved these problems, but the answer turned out to be not what I expected." -Stephen Hawking One of the most puzzling things about Black Holes is that if you wait around long enough, they’ll evaporate completely. The curved spacetime outside of the event horizon still undergoes quantum effects, and when you combine General Relativity and quantum field theory in exactly that fashion, you get a blackbody spectrum of thermal radiation out. Hawking radiation is what…

Do mites really live on my face?

This is the question everyone eventually asks themselves. The answer is no. They live all over your body in the follicles of your hair. But, the situation is much more complicated than that, and in fact there is a lot we don't know about these mites. But, there is a scientist who may be willing to scrape some of the mites off your face in order to advance our knowledge ... of something many people would probably not really want to know about. We’re interested in studying the evolution and diversification of Demodex mites ...we want to use the information encoded in Demodex DNA to map the…

Congressman Dan Young of Alaska on Mexicans and Mexican-Americans

This is why we can't have nice things, like immigration reform. From MSNBC: Amid a hot-button debate in Washington over how to overhaul the nation's immigration laws, Rep. Don Young, a 21-term lawmaker, referred to immigrant workers as "wetbacks" — a term that could threaten to inflame the debate about immigration reform. "My father had a ranch; we used to have 50-60 wetbacks to pick tomatoes," Young said in an interview with radio station KRBD. He was discussing the number of jobs that have been made irrelevant due to advances in automation. Young is one of the top Republicans in the House.…

Do You Really Need a Graph for That?

As long as I'm picking on education research papers in Science, I might as well call out the one immediately after the paper I wrote up in the previous post. This one, titled Graduate Students' Teaching Experiences Improve Their Methodological Research Skills, is another paper whose basic premise I generally agree with-- they found that graduate students who had teaching responsibilities as well as research responsibilities did a better job of writing research proposals than graduate students who only did research. From all appearances, it's a good study, and makes a valuable point. And yet,…

A Touch of Pitted Ware

So I spent the day on GÃ¥lö, happily digging & sieving a square meter on a Middle Neolithic shore site 25 meters above current sea level that my friend Roger found two years ago. I haven't dug that period since 1993 when I spent almost the entire fieldwork season on the classic Bollbacken site outside VästerÃ¥s. (I did however write a paper about another site of the era in the early 00s.) Today I found knapped quartz and basalt and granite (!) and a lot of small potsherds, one of which has the Pitted Ware culture's signature pits and comb-stamp decoration. Mattias found the best…

SPORE ARNIE!!!

I have several fun Real Science(TM) posts in the works... But today I got the new SPORE Creature Creator*... So I guess you all figured out where my evening went... LOL! I made a SPORE ARNIE!!!! Im already in love with SPORE Arnie. Though SPORE follows the cliche unicellular< multicellular < aquatic animal < land animal evolution 'ladder', I can see myself getting emotionally attached to my creatures (even though I really want to be a virus and destroy other peoples civilizations *pout*). Its already gotten bad, after I gave SPORE Arnie some puppies to play with, and I heard them…

Sermon and Sermonette

We're going to have to start calling ourselves the Three Wise Atheists of of Scienceblogs: as Revere reveals in his Sunday Sermonette, he, Greg, and I don't seem to have much difficulty with this Christmas stuff, and contrary to the Fox propaganda channel, most atheists and cheerful holidays with our families and friends, just like Christians, only without the boring superstitious part. I really don't understand how people can so consistently fail to get it — our atheist Christmas is so much better than anyone else's, because we get the presents and feasts and fun without the tedious ritual…

O'Brien's Brave Leap in the Dark

My pet troll has decided to take on Dan Ray on the subject of federalism, in response to a comment Dan left here earlier. He seems to think that Dan is a professor of "business and tech ed" from "Podunk U", when he is actually the director of the Paralegal Studies program at Eastern Michigan University. Even more amusing than the fact that he quotes from a Supreme Court decision that was overruled last year is the ending: Also, professor Dan, as a professor of "Business & Tech Ed," you are in no position to judge Dr. Dembski's qualifications or mine, as we are far above you on the totem…

Was Earth Born With Life On It? (Synopsis)

“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive — to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” -Marcus Aurelius How old is life on Earth? If all you had to go on was the fossil record, you'd run into severe trouble once you went back more than one or two billion years, as all your rock would have metamorphosed, making examination and identification of fossils impossible. But recently, we've discovered another method: to measure the isotopic content of carbon deposits in ancient rock formations. Image credit: E A Bell et al, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 2015,…

Ask Ethan #110: What Did The Sky Look Like When Earth First Formed? (Synopsis)

“In such moments, offering up his heart at the hour when the flowers of night inhale their perfume, lighted like a lamp in the center of the starry night, expanding his soul in ecstasy in the midst of the universal radiance of creation, he could not himself perhaps have told what was passing in his own mind; he felt something depart from him, and something descend upon him, mysterious interchanges of the depths of the soul with the depths of the universe.” -Victor Hugo The night sky is a memorable, inimitable sight. With the exception of the planets, the stars that shine so brightly and…

CONFIRMED: The Last Great Prediction Of The Big Bang! (Synopsis)

“When you see how fragile and delicate life can be, all else fades into the background.” -Jenna Morasca The hot Big Bang -- proposed seventy years ago -- is a tremendous success story. Predicated on the assumption that the Universe was hotter, denser, more uniform and expanding faster in the past, it's allowed us to predict the rate of cosmic expansion over distance and time, the primeval abundances of the light elements, the formation and evolution of large-scale-structure, and the existence and properties of the cosmic microwave background: the leftover photon glow from the Big Bang. Image…

Throwback Thursday: Are asteroids dangerous? (Synopsis)

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” -H. P. Lovecraft When it comes to risk assessment, there's one type that humans are notoriously bad at: the very low-frequency but high-consequence risks and rewards. It's why so many of us are so eager to play the lottery, and simultaneously why we're catastrophically afraid of ebola and plane crashes, when we're far more likely to die from something mundane, like getting hit by a truck. One of the examples where science and this type of fear-based fallacy intersect is the…

Mostly Mute Monday: The Milky Way’s Most Recent Supernova (Synopsis)

“And no one showed us to the land And no one knows the where’s or why’s But something stirs and something tries And starts to climb towards the light” -Pink Floyd, Echoes It's pretty difficult to imagine, but a little over 300 years ago, a supernova -- a dying, ultramassive star -- exploded, giving rise to such a luminous explosion that it might have shone as bright as our entire galaxy. And nobody on Earth saw it. Image credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA); Acknowledgment: R. Fesen (Dartmouth) and J. Morse (Univ. of Colorado). Located in the plane of our Milky Way galaxy…

Ask Ethan #54: What’s the Earliest Signal from the Universe? (Synopsis)

“From earliest times, humans — explorers and thinkers — have wanted to figure out the shape of their world. Forever, the way we’ve done that is through storytelling. It is difficult to let the truth get in the way of a good story.” -Adam Savage When we look back into the Universe, there's a wonderful, remarkable story that it tells us about itself. The more light we gather, of different wavelengths and over longer periods of time, the more we can discover. Image credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and…

Colder than empty space? How the Boomerang Nebula does it (Synopsis)

“If you want your boomerang to come back, first you've got to throw it.” -Steven Hall If you take all the matter out of the Universe, all you’d have left to warm you would be the radiation from the Big Bang’s leftover glow: the cosmic microwave background. At just 2.7º C above absolute zero, there’s no way of escaping this omnidirectional heat bath, as weak and ineffectual as it might be. Yet right here in our own galaxy, we’ve got an example of something even colder: the Boomerang Nebula. A millimeter-wavelength view of the Boomerang Nebula. Image credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF/NASA/STScI/JPL-Caltech…

The Most Impossible Technology From Star Trek (Synopsis)

“‘Star Trek’ says that it has not all happened, it has not all been discovered, that tomorrow can be as challenging and adventurous as any time man has ever lived.” –Gene Roddenberry Today marks the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Star Trek, our first science fiction adventure that promised a positive view of the future, ushered in by technology and humanity's best traits. In addition to a utopia where maladies like hunger, disease and poverty were eradicated, Star Trek promised a future where technology was widely available and sufficiently advanced to the benefit of all of humanity.…

The strongest gravitational show in the Universe (Synopsis)

"The first amazing fact about gravitation is that the ratio of inertial mass to gravitational mass is constant wherever we have checked it. The second amazing thing about gravitation is how weak it is." -Richard Feynman One of the strangest, most novel predictions of Einstein's relativity is that mass would not only curve space, but that the curved space would act like a lens. Background light traveling past this mass would become magnified, distorted and stretched. In some cases, arc, multiple images or even perfect, 360º rings would occur. This image illustrates a gravitational lensing…

How far away is the Universe's most distant galaxy? (Synopsis)

"Science, however, gives me the feeling of steady progress: I am convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy. It has revolutionized fundamental concepts, e.g., about space and time (relativity), about causality (quantum theory), and about substance and matter (atomistics), and it has taught us new methods of thinking (complementarity) which are applicable far beyond physics." -Max Born The farther away we look in the Universe, the farther back in time we look as well, since light has a finite speed. But if a galaxy's light takes a million years to reach you, that galaxy is going…

Plug, plug, plug

You may have noticed (how could you avoid it?) all the information about Seed's new contest: if you're commenting with a valid email address, you're in the drawing. The prize is a 5-day trip to a great science city (there's a poll to determine which one) — this is good, because even if some wacky creationist or HIV denialist or demented Republican wins, their reward will be some intense exposure to real science. I tell you, the brains behind this outfit are cunning and nefarious in their machinations. (If you are one of those deluded individuals who doesn't want their illusions dashed, you…

We won't have Dianne Mandernach to kick around anymore

Our Minnesota Health Commissioner, a Republican appointee who was supported by our Republican governor through a number of startlingly clueless incidents, has finally resigned. Here's a short summary of her career: This summer, Mandernach was criticized over her suppression of a state study about 35 cancer deaths related to taconite mining on Minnesota's Iron Range. In 2004, her credibility suffered when a website posting by the department suggested that abortion might have a role in breast cancer. Critics denounced those claims as junk science, and the wording was removed from the website.…

Labs vs. "Real" Courses

One final Steve Gimbel note. Toward the end of his anti-lab post, he writes: If you want to see a science professor get angry, just tell them that they teach all those labs to get out of teaching real courses. You'll see faces get flush, veins pop out of heads and necks, and receive a high decibel screed about not understanding how time intensive it is to prepare labs and grade lab reports. They are incredibly touchy about this issue. Maybe it's because it's true, maybe it isn't; but either way, it does mean that there are fewer science classes taught. This is, I hope, the dumbest thing I'll…

links for 2008-10-11

slacktivist: They need help "The reason I've been writing about/obsessing over things like the P&G rumor or the usefulness of Snopes is that I'm trying to figure out how to liberate the captives of unreality. " (tags: politics psychology US society culture education) Images of the 2008 TC3 fireball from space! - The Planetary Society Blog | The Planetary Society "It seems that no one in Sudan was able to record the 2008 TC3 fireball; the only image I've seen that was shot from the ground was one very tiny pixel in the sky seen from a beach in Egypt. But in this day and age, there are…

The Metastable Xenon Project

Over the past several weeks, I've written up ResearchBlogging posts on each of the papers I helped write in graduate school. Each paper write-up was accompanied by a "Making of" article, giving a bit more detail about how the experiments came to be, what my role in them was, and whatever funny anecdotes I can think of about the experiment. If you haven't been following the series, or would just like a convenient index of the posts, here's the complete set: Introduction and explanation of metastable xenon. Experiment 1: Optical Control of Ultracold Collisions and the making thereof.…

Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow

Over in LiveJournal Land, James Nicoll has a good idea that I'm going to steal. Over at SF Signal, they asked a bunch of writers what they would change about SF. Ken Macleod (author and occasional blogger) wrote, in part: It's just rare to see stories written about a future that the writer believes in and the reader can get excited about - let alone one they'd like to live in. What we need is a new intellectual engagement with the real possibilities, coupled with a new confidence in humanity's capacity to deal with them. James challenges his readership of SF fans to design such a future, but…

Who is more generous?

Give Up Blog posts a fascinating map of charitable giving by state, to shoot down a fatuous WSJ op-ed that tries to claim greater charity as a Red State virtue. I certainly don't see a positive correlation there, do you? That claim brings to mind another common misconception, that religion is the driving force behind charity. Here's another map, of the distribution of the ungodly (not just atheists, but agnostics and other people who are not affiliated with any organized religion.) Again, any correlation between these two maps looks like it would be fairly weak, and isn't going to support…

That's more like it

While it's nice to have the Dilbonians* still whimpering and howling in frustration and fury, here's an even better testimonial to my talents: PZ, I'm sorry I slighted you. I now have seen the light. You lull your victims into a false sense of security by manifesting as a mild-mannered biology prof, but in reality you are an unspeakably hideous hybrid of Cthulhu and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, living in a shadow lair beyond time and space, called Minnesota. You suck your victims' brains out through their eye sockets and gorge until sated. You are the very embodiment of evil. I am well…

Something funny and not so funny

It is not so funny that the Georgian Army is accused of attempting ethnic genocide in southern Ossetia, that the Russians have been bombing cities in Georgia, that the Georgians or somebody have shot down two Russian fighter planes, and that things seem to be escalating. Dozens, maybe hundreds, by some reports thousands dead. This was especially unfunny a couple of hours ago when my daughter came to be in tears having heard the latest news ... her mother is currently in Georgia trapped in a region that is not seeing any fighting, but it is a small country. (Julia is very rarely this upset…

He coulda been a BLOGGER. He coulda been somebody, instead of a bum premiere influenza researcher!

Earlier this week, Peter Palese visited our Uni (he made it through Oklahomas version of hazing: a night of tornadoes, LOL!). I gotta say, man, that guy might be one of the biggest names in influenza/virology research. He might have a few hundred publications. He might be a member of the National Academy. But that guy? Peter Palese? Hes got the heart of a BLAGGER! He gossiped with us students at lunch about kook scientists and anti-vaxers and snake-oil salesmen, it was so much fun! Heres my favorite story :) Back in the day, when Dr. Palese was cutting his teeth as a scientist, Linus…

Links for 2010-10-27

Video: Fingerless Robotic Hand Can Pick Anything | Wired Science | Wired.com "The simple gripper is made of a bag of coffee grounds and a vacuum, though other grains such as couscous and sand also work, says study coauthor Eric Brown of the University of Chicago. To pick something up, the bag of loose grounds first melds around the object. Then, as a vacuum sucks air out of the spaces between grains, the gripper stiffens, packing itself into a hard vice molded to the outline of the object. Reducing the bag's starting volume by just a teeny amount -- less than 1 percent of the total -- was…

Aussie, Aussie, Aussie. Oy.

A News of the Stupid story that's too good to pass up. I mean, how can you not click on a headline like "Men Accused of Wrestling Python Outside McDonald's": MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) -- Two men were arrested after bewildered diners at a McDonald's spotted them wrestling a 5-foot (1.5 meter) python named Boris in the restaurant parking lot, police said Thursday. Victoria state police said the men stole the 8-year-old black-headed python and a lizard from a pet shop on Wednesday. They then brought the snake to the McDonald's parking lot, where they began wrestling with it in front of puzzled…

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Obsessive Update (US Version)

The Barnes and Noble store finder finally indicated the presence of copies in the local stores yesterday, so we made a trip down to the Colonie Center, where they had a half-dozen face out in the Physics section, and probably 15-20 on the new releases table. Woo-hoo! (Now I can shift to fretting that they've got too many in the local stores, and will end up returning most of them...) Anyway, if you're in the Albany area, and want a copy, they have them in Barnes and Noble now. Miscellaneous other items: A nice plug from Derek Lowe How to Teach Physics to Your Dog catches the eye of another…

links for 2009-04-23

Particulate pollution cuts carbon dioxide, model shows - physicsworld.com "Falling levels of aerosol pollution could make it much harder to curb the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. That is the conclusion of climate researchers in the UK and Switzerland, who have found that pollution in the form of aerosol particles gives a dramatic boost to plantsâ photosynthesis. " (tags: science physics environment news biology chemistry optics) Venus Day 2009: 10 Things You Can Do To Help Rid The Atmosphere Of Noxious, Flesh-Burning Sulfuric Acid | The Onion - America's Finest News Source "Could…

Danish Science Journalism Meeting to Focus on Framing

In the U.S., there is often the false assumption that Europeans are somehow more engaged and supportive of science than Americans. Yet, as I discuss in several studies and as I have written about in articles, instead of science literacy, the same generalizable interaction between values, social identity, and media portrayals drive European perceptions of science debates. Indeed, cross-national survey studies show that while science remains the most widely admired and respected institution in American society, Europeans are far more ambivalent about the costs, risks, and benefits of science…

Michael Pollan: Chewed Up and Spit Out

Oh boy. Pollan's new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, gets eviscerated in this review by James McWilliams at the Texas Observer (Laura Shapiro at Slate isn't a fan either, though offers some hope in her review; an issue of the journal Gastronomica last summer also called out Pollan on some features of his approach and message). I haven't read the new book, so this link is neither an endorsement of McWilliams's review nor of Pollan's text. But, wow, the review is a fun read. The opening line to Pollan's new book is this: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." McWilliams's…

Squid attack!

If anyone is interested in writing a Lovecraftian horror novel and getting all the details just right, I recommend this paper by Kier and Leeuwen. They used a high-speed camera to capture exactly how a squid, Loligo pealei, strikes and seizes its prey. Isn't it beautiful? In the first frame, you can see the animal poised with its arms and tentacles pointed like an explode at the target, a shrimp. Then, as the squid slides forward, the two tentacles race forward with impressive speed (these frames are 10msec apart; the whole sequence occurs in a bit more than a tenth of a second), and the…

Anti-Caturday post

"Caturday"? What is this "Caturday" frippery I see on various blogs today? It seems to consist entirely of photos and video clips of small furry predators in repose or at play, and it's not very interesting. Let us try something more stimulating. Loom from Polynoid on Vimeo. The "ooh"ing and "aah"ing and "how cute!"ing may now commence from the gallery. You may also choose to watch it in HD. Watch it multiple times — it's beautiful. My favorite part is when the spider enfolds her prey in her long elegant legs and injects it with enzymes that cause its organs to melt. Don't talk to me about…

Cockburn on Climate Change (again)

Awhile back, Mark Hoofnagle took on what he termed "the lunatic ravings" of Alexander Cockburn in The Nation. In his piece, Mark noted that Cockburn wrote: Not so long ago, [Martin] Hertzberg sent me some of his recent papers on the global warming hypothesis, a construct now accepted by many progressives as infallible as Papal dogma on matters of faith or doctrine. Among them was the graph described above so devastating to the hypothesis. To which Mark replied: Ah, papers! But wait. Where are these papers published? Where are the citations? Where is the peer review? How can we possibly…

Quiet Bison get more play

Ha! I knew it. The quiet animals get more play than the loud obnoxious ones: During bison mating season, the quietest bulls score the most mates and sire the most offspring while studs with the loudest bellows see the least action, according to a surprising new study by researchers at University of California, Davis, and Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. The researchers also found that the volume of a bull's bellow was not related to its weight or age. "We were expecting to find that the bigger, stronger guys -- the high-quality males -- would have the loudest bellows, because…

A clarification about the pending Gonzalez lawsuit, for Bad Astronomy

Phil over at Bad Astronomy has it a bit backwards, but hey it's not his fault. He didn't have to sit through that nightmare of a press conference. I still stick by my own conclusion too, that by trying to say that Gonzalez's religious freedom has been curtailed, they are admitting ID is religion and not science, which they vehemently denied with the Dover case. I think if this comes to court, that'll be a fun issue to grill them about. From the press conference, the DI is clearly trying to distance religion from ID. The subject never really came up until a reporter asked about it. Even a…

Effect of Kennesaw law on burglaries

John De Armond said: Kennesaw is the city. Even though the law is symbolic, it served its purpose. Burglaries dropped to zero the following year. That's ZERO. Nadda. Gee, this story gets better every time it is told. Next time it is repeated I suppose we will hear about how the the Kennesaw gun law caused the rate to become negative. Here are the actual numbers (from Sociology & Social Research v74:1 p51) Kennesaw Burglaries 1976-1986 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 48 85 86 41 21 22 35 35 54 35 35 29 32 70 The Kennesaw law was passed on March 15, 1982 and pretty clearly had no effect on the…

The Integrative Biology of Exercise VII - Day 1

The opening session was great! By Tatsuo Yamashita (Flickr: ワンセグで紅白をみます 2012/12/31) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Eric Hoffman (Children's National Medical Center) presented work on chronic inflammatory diseases in children. He mentioned that while diets high in fats and carbohydrates (i.e. Western diets), obesity and sedentary lifestyles are associated with inflammation and related diseases (ex: asthma, type 2 diabetes), another contributor could be hormones. Kids who stay indoors more often have reduced exposure to sunlight and exercise…

A protein that improves exercise capacity

Cartoon image from www.teenwritersblog.com Physiologist Laurie Goodyear (Joslin Diabetes Center, Harvard Medical School, MA) and her colleagues recently published a study in the American Journal of Physiology that shows how overexpressing a protein can increase exercise capacity. The protein of interest was tribbles homolog 3 (TRB3), which is a mammalian form of the tribbles protein found in fruit flies (aka: Drosophila). Prior to this study, data suggested that TRB3 plays a role in metabolism so Dr. Goodyear's team decided to examine this more closely in skeletal muscle, which is a major…

Starvation is the fountain of youth, for worms at least

Image of C. elegans from http://www.easternct.edu/~adams/C.eleganslanding.html New research published in PLOS Genetics shows that starving C. elegans (Caenorhabditis elegans) during the late larval stage of development when the worms are undergoing tissue growth and formation halts cellular activity at previously unknown checkpoints in their development. These findings show that nutrition is an important cue to signal whether or not the worms should continue on to the next stage of development. Interestingly, the two-week starvation period actually doubled the lifespan of the worms as they…