cold

Image by Botaurus - Wikimedia commons A changing climate has the potential to greatly impact ectotherms, which depend on the environment to regulate their own body temperatures. In a new study published in the American Journal of Physiology- Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology, researchers were curious how exposure to varying temperatures would affect developing ectotherms. They answered this question using Drosophila melanogaster, commonly known as fruit flies. They exposed freshly laid eggs to ten different temperatures ranging from 12 to 32°C, the upper and lower limit of…
Yesterday (Tuesday) was another great day for Comparative Physiology! Congratulations to Dr. Arthur DeVries (above; Professor Emeritus, Department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology; Professor of Animal Biology, University of Illinois), this year's recipient of the August Krogh Distinguished lecturer award from the Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology section of the American Physiological Society. Dr. DeVries gave an excellent seminar summarizing his career studying fish that live in some of the coldest waters without freezing! The fish accomplish this amazing task by having anti-…
This is the time of year parents start scanning their facebook feeds and other sources of information for what to expect our children to get sick with, how badly, and when. For a couple of years in a row, a few years ago, we were getting hit with a norovirus, causing diarrhea, vomiting, and a lot of lost daycare or school days. This year we are seeing reports of an outbreak of the scary-sounding "Enterovirus EV-D68." Hundreds of kids are sick enough to get treatment in several states, currently Colorado, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Illinois, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia and Kentucky…
"A cosmic mystery of immense proportions, once seemingly on the verge of solution, has deepened and left astronomers and astrophysicists more baffled than ever. The crux ... is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing." -William J. Broad It was in the 1930s, looking at dense clusters of galaxies (like Coma, below), that Fritz Zwicky first noticed that the mass in the Universe didn't add up. Image credit: Adam Block / Mount Lemmon SkyCenter / University of Arizona. We knew how gravity worked, so it was pretty straightforward -- based on how the galaxies within…
A "potentially historic" blizzard is barreling down on us here in New England, and is poised to drop up to two feet of snow on Boston. All of the schools in the area preemptively closed, our public transit system is shutting down at 3:30pm, and trying to buy groceries last night was bedlam. The snow is just now beginning to fall. Winter in New England can be rough, especially for a California-raised boy like me. It's not just because of the snow and cold, it's also the influenza and common colds. Source - Flickr user "Placbo" The fact that the rate of some infections can vary by season is…
by Kim Krisberg It was a lucky winter for Becky Belmont. The weather was on her side. As the director of energy and weatherization at West Central Minnesota Communities Action Inc., Belmont was sure the agency would run out of energy assistance funds to help all those in need. But fortunately, a mild Minnesota winter translated into fewer residents who needed help keeping their homes warm this year. Today, Belmont seems pretty optimistic that even with declining funds, the agency will have enough funding to last through May 31, which marks the end of its Energy Assistance Program year. This…
and yet more photo spam: Last week it was cold. It was warmer at the weekend. But this week it is cold again. Though as RC points out, its not going to be the coldest winter for a millenium. We went rowing tonight. Oddly enough we were the only crew out. We had to stop past the Elizabeth way bridge due to ice on the river - not solid sheets at that point, but enough floating bits to warn us that worse was coming. Very cold, I rowed with a glove on my inner hand and only survived by sticking my outer hand down my trousers when we span. Still it was a good warm-up for a pint in the Fort.…
Exciting news just in - its cold in Cambridgeshire. All over the UK I expect, but I haven't checked. indeed I haven't checked out all of Cambridgeshire, let alone Cambridge, but never mind I'll trust the reports. I tried putting my foot onto the snow and I can confirm: yes, it is cold. Not much snow mind: maybe 1 cm when fresh. Cycling is fun too. I haven't come off, but then again it is dry-cold mostly in the evening coming back, and in the morning the streets at least are ice-free. Rowing this evening was distinctly chilly. Don't click on the photo to the left - its rubbish. See the Fort…
tags: Richard Feynman Explains Jiggling Atoms, science, physics, imagination, hot, offbeat, cold, jiggling atoms, physical laws, Richard Feynman, streaming video Physicist Richard Feynman thinks aloud about atoms and how they jiggle, and how we perceive that jiggling as 'hot' and 'cold'. From the BBC TV series 'Fun to Imagine' (1983).
Not Exactly Pocket Science is a set of shorter write-ups on new stories with links to more detailed takes by the world's best journalists and bloggers. It is meant to complement the usual fare of detailed pieces that are typical for this blog. Cold-proof tongue allows early chameleon to catch early insect Chameleons are some of the most versatile of lizards. They live in baking deserts and freezing mountaintops and part of their success hinges on a weapon that works just as well in the warmth as in the cold - its tongue. Relying on stored elastic power for its ballistic strike, the…
Just over a week ago, I re-ran a post "How Not to Freeze" about what to do if you don't have central heating in the winter in cold places. I was fascinated by the responses I got from people who by necessity and desire were living with minimal heat. My assumption about "how not to freeze" was that most people wouldn't being doing this by choice. And that's probably true but I found yesterdays New York Times article, about people who trade warmth for aesthetics, bigger spaces or other considerations to be fascinating (and not just because they gave some cred to La Crunch for her "Freeze…
So I was coming upstairs after talking to the digits about the things you talk to digits about, when a little beep came from my mobile receiving a text message and I just knew it was going to be the outing coming On. 4pm on a cold dark monday with only 4 people signed up: I thought there was a fair chance of it being cancelled and me getting a chance to work late (oooh how I love a chance to work late). But no, thanks to James (the one how lives on a boat, except that isn't specific enough, the one who lives on a boat and has a cat not a dog, that will do) we were out in the Four of Death (…
Cold, isn't it? And quite dark too (is that the [[Equation of time]]?). But I'm rather enjoying this snow - it is clear and crisp, so far. I've only fallen off once. [Update: Looks cold but lovely from above [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/8447023.stm ]. Mind you, it is warm elsewhere] There are sandals underneath that, in case you'd missed how hard I am :-)
This is the eighth of eight posts on evolutionary research to celebrate Darwin's bicentennial. In Virginia, USA, sits a facility called the American Type Culture Collection. Within its four walls lie hundreds of freezers containing a variety of frozen biological samples and among these, are 99 strains of the common cold. These 99 samples represent all the known strains of the human rhinoviruses that cause colds. And all of their genomes have just been laid bare. Ann Palmenberg from the University of Wisconsin and David Spiro from the J. Craig Venter Institute have cracked the genomes of all…
Some of you who've been following astronomy for awhile might remember this report, where a group of astronomers reported finding a giant "void" in the Universe. What is a void? Well, galaxies are distributed pretty randomly, but because of gravity, they cluster together. A small example is our local group which looks like this, and a larger example is the Virgo cluster, which is about 1,000 times as massive as our local group, and looks like this: Well, a void is the opposite of a cluster, where you have a large volume of space that's simply empty of galaxies and matter. This press release…