potassium
dr. dolittle | September 9, 2014 Image of mosquito from http://bloodinurineandpainofca.wordpress.com/
Until now I thought I had come up with enough reasons to dislike mosquitoes, those tiny little blood sucking vectors of disease. With reports of the debilitating mosquito-borne virus chikungunya in the Americas (Carribean), I was ecstatic hear that researchers are working hard to find ways to control mosquito populations. As mentioned in a previous blog, only the females bite to obtain nourishment for developing eggs. According to the study authors, the female mosquito can double her own body weight after just one meal,…
dr. dolittle | June 24, 2014
Image of Biwa salmon from the Lake Biwa Museum (http://www.lbm.go.jp/english/exhibits/aquarium.html)
It is not surprising that Biwa salmon (image above), a subspecies of Oncorhyncus masou, do not adapt to seawater very well after having been landlocked in Lake Biwa, Japan for the last 500,000 years or so. Researchers from Hokkaido University and Shiga Prefecture Fishery Experiment Station in Japan wanted to know what caused the salmon to lose their ability to thrive in salt water. In a new paper published in the American Journal of Physiology they compared the sodium/potassium pumps in…