Research
awild | April 5, 2010[a guest post by myrmecologist Andrea Lucky]
Andrea & her intrepid field team in New Guinea
It was a dark and stormy night...
...actually, it was a dark and stormy morning. The dawn of the 7th day of ceaseless frigid rain to be precise, and I was reminiscing about the grand old days one week before when the sun emerged and for a glorious 10 minutes it was warm enough to splash some water on my arms, legs and neck and wipe away the accumulated grime that is synonymous with field work. I wondered if that lovely burst of sunshine would ever come again (no, it wouldn't), and every time I…
grrlscientist | April 5, 2010tags: gorilla, death, mortality, science, humor, funny, satire, fucking hilarious, Onion News Network, ONN, streaming video
Tulane University researchers have successfully taught a captive gorilla that he will die one day. The gorilla, named Quigley, is now able to experience the crippling fear of impending death previously only accessible to humans.
grrlscientist | March 29, 2010tags: Alex Filippenko, Josh Frieman, FermiLab, astronomy, astrophysics, Science Bulletins, research, American Museum of Natural History, AMNH, New York City, space, nature, universe, The Expanding Universe, streaming video
In 1998, astrophysicists discovered a baffling phenomenon: the Universe is expanding at an ever-faster rate. Either an enigmatic force called dark energy is to blame or a reworking of gravitational theory is in order. In this new Science Bulletins video, watch a FermiLab team assemble the Dark Energy Camera, a device that could finally solve this space-stretching mystery…
tsaunders | March 22, 2010In his post last Friday, Peter did a very nice job of introducing the the counter-intuitive idea that having too little fat, rather than too much, causes many of the metabolic problems of obesity. Today I thought it would be good to continue on with this theme and to focus on some of the mechanisms that explain this strange relationship. Let's begin where Peter ended off:
Currently, the emerging theory of why obesity is associated with metabolic disease risk suggests that it is not the excess amount of fat that results in problems - but rather, it is the inability of the fat tissue (…
tsaunders | March 17, 2010
Image by Duchamp.
In most developed nations, kids get far less physical activity than they did just a few generations ago. Given the strong links between physical inactivity and health risk (and given that we're now seeing "adult" diseases like heart disease and type 2 diabetes in children and teenagers), this has become a very real public health concern. Unfortunately, when it comes to increasing childhood physical activity levels, people often want to reinvent the wheel. For example, many people are enthralled with the Nintendo Wii as a means of increasing childhood physical…
omnibrain | March 16, 2010In an amazing turn of events the most famous video of all time not on youtube is now on youtube... omg! omg! haha...
Follow the instructions if you actually haven't seen this before (which I would be surprised if you have not).
oh and look... Dan and Chris have a blog!
cagapakis | March 13, 2010Carboxysomes are small compartments inside photosynthetic bacteria where the machinery for capturing carbon dioxide is concentrated. You can see carboxysomes and their characteristic virus-like shape when you look at slices of these bacteria under an electron microscope:
Until recently, no one had looked at carboxysomes under the microscope in cells that were still alive. My labmates Dave and Bruno developed a way to label carboxysomes with fluorescent proteins and track them under a microscope as the cells grow, and their amazing paper in Science details some of the fascinating systems they…
tsaunders | March 12, 2010Photo by Kamshots.
Regular readers of Obesity Panacea will know that I am a huge fan of active transportation (e.g. walking or cycling to work, rather than commuting by vehicle). I just can't say enough good things about it. It often takes about the same amount of time as commuting by vehicle, plus it ensures that you're getting at least some physical activity on even the busiest days. Even just taking transit instead of driving yourself increases your chances of meeting the daily physical activity guidelines, since transit trips almost always involve some walking on either end of the…
tsaunders | March 8, 2010
Image by atomicjeep
I came across a very interesting article in the Ottawa Citizen this weekend, unpleasantly titled "For Canada's obese, exercise alone isn't going to cut it". The crux of the article is this - exercise will not help you lose weight. Every few months it seems that this issue pops up, including a cover article in TIME magazine last year, which Peter has previously dissected. This is a complicated issue, and given the sensational title, I wasn't expecting much from the Citizen article. But the article is actually very well written, and includes interviews with a number…
grrlscientist | March 8, 2010tags: reptiles, chameleon species, herpetology, Chris Raxworthy, research, American Museum of Natural History, AMNH, New York City, field research, nature, travel, Madagascar, speciation, streaming video
With Madagascar containing nearly two-third's of the world's chameleon species, Christopher Raxworthy, Associate Curator of Herpetology at the American Museum of Natural History, recently embarked on an expedition to the island in search of these special lizards. His hope was to track down the lined-chameleon in order to further study speciation on Madagascar.
Having recently returned from…
tsaunders | March 7, 2010
Photo by Todd Huffman.
One of the great things about this site is that people often bring products or research to our attention that we otherwise might have missed. This occurred yesterday in the comments section of Peter's recent post on Acai berry scams, when one of our readers brought up the use of Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (HCG) in the treatment of obesity. The website that we were provided smacks of weight loss gimmickry - notably the promise of an obesity "cure" and "near 100% success rate", but we thought it best to review the evidence before making a judgement one way or…
tsaunders | March 7, 2010
Photo by pugetsoundphotowalks.
Regardless of your shape or size, physical activity has been shown to add years to your life, and life to your years. But believe it or not, the benefits of physical activity are not restricted to exercise performed in the gym. In fact, one of the easiest ways to improve your health may be through increasing the amount of low intensity physical activity you perform throughout the day. For example, simply increasing the number of steps that you take each day is very likely to reduce your risk for diseases like diabetes and cardiovascular disease. It's still…
cagapakis | March 4, 2010My paper, "Insulation of a synthetic hydrogen metabolism circuit in bacteria" just came out in the Journal of Biological Engineering! And it's open access!
We designed a metabolic circuit in bacteria that produces hydrogen (a potentially useful fuel) from natural precursors in the cell. The proteins in our synthetic pathway work to make hydrogen by transferring high-energy electrons from pyruvate, a common metabolite, to protons that are freely floating in the watery cytoplasm. The electrons transfer between the proteins through quantum-mechanical tunneling, which makes hydrogenases and…
cagapakis | February 18, 2010Almost every living thing shares an identical genetic code, with three nucleic acids in an RNA sequence coding for a single amino acid in the translated protein sequence. While there are 64 three-letter RNA sequences, there are only 20 amino acids and degeneracy in the code allows some amino acids to be coded by multiple codons. Chemists and synthetic biologists in the past few years have been working to expand this genetic code, with unnatural nucleotides that can be incorporated into DNA and RNA sequences and unnatural amino acids that can expand the chemical functionality of proteins.…
mikethemadbiologist | February 17, 2010ScienceBlogling Abel Pharmboy asks two questions about collegiality and tenure:
1. Do you think that lack of collegiality is grounds for denial of tenure for a candidate that otherwise meets the basic quantitative criteria outlined in university guidelines?
2. Do you feel that collegiality - or whatever you want to call it: teamwork, cooperation - should be an important factor in making academic tenure decisions?
To get question 1 out of the way, I'm assuming that the guidelines don't specifically mention collegiality (which is really stupid). In that case, to deny someone tenure based on…
terrasig | February 13, 2010First and foremost our condolences go to all our our colleagues at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and others in the Huntsville science community such as Twitter friend, @girlscientist, Dr. Chris Gunter.
As we are learning, yesterday's shooting occurred after UAH Assistant Professor of Biology, Dr. Amy Bishop, learned that she would not be awarded tenure. My sentiment is very much that of my colleague, DrugMonkey. Originally appointed as a faculty member in 2003, she had previously been an Instructor at Harvard University after earning her PhD in Medical Sciences there in 1998.
We…
cagapakis | February 12, 2010My labmate Bruno's newest paper, "A synthetic circuit for selectively arresting daughter cells to create aging populations" came out today in the journal Nucleic Acids Research (and it's open access!). Using a cleverly designed genetic circuit that activates cell growth arrest in newly divided cells only in the presence of a drug, Bruno was able to create a population of yeast made up of only old cells, called the "daughter arrester."
You would think that yeast, being so single celled and bread-y, wouldn't be able to tell us much about human biology or anything as complex as aging, but many…
cagapakis | January 26, 2010Today in my searches for the hot new trends in synthetic biology, I found a news article from Science Daily with an intriguing title: "Scientists Achieve First Rewire of Genetic Switches." Rewiring genetic switches sounds pretty neat, but this headline was intriguing to me first of all because it's kind of late to the party--in fact one of the first papers in modern synthetic biology back in 2000 was about engineered genetic switches: "Construction of a genetic toggle switch in Escherichia coli". When I looked more closely, the article wasn't about this kind of transcriptional switch though,…
cagapakis | January 24, 2010Cooperation and altruism are widespread in biology, from molecules and genes working together in a cell, to bacterial communities that require coordinated behavior to survive in a tough environment, to human relationships and societies. Our human cultural perspective (perhaps even more specifically our American cultural perspective, focused as it is on individuality, free markets, and the American Dream), however, treats cooperation as an outright anomaly that has to be explained away by science (or often, religion). If natural selection is about the "survival of the fittest" how can a…
cagapakis | January 21, 2010Oscillators are huge in synthetic biology. They're an exciting challenge, very hard to make in a controlled, robust way, they have the potential to be useful in many applications, like well-timed drug delivery, and they can tell us a lot about how natural circadian rhythms work. A new paper in this week's issue of Nature from Jeff Hasty's group at UCSD presents a new synthetic biological oscillator in bacteria. While there have been a lot of oscillators designed in the past few years, this one is special because it couples oscillations in fluorescence to bacterial quorum sensing, allowing the…