- May 25, 2012
- 11:02 AM
- 1 view
Octopuses Host a Masterclass on Hiding
by Elizabeth Preston in Inkfish
When you're surrounded by an ocean full of potential predators, the best way to avoid seeing the inside of one's stomach is to make sure none of them see you in the first place. Octopuses and some other cephalopods are experts at camouflage, manipulating the colors and textures of their skin to hide in plain sight. But their strategy, it turns out, has nothing to do with disappearing into the background.
To learn the camouflaging secrets of the masters, researchers led by Noam Josef at Ben-........ Read more »
Josef, N., Amodio, P., Fiorito, G., & Shashar, N. (2012) Camouflaging in a Complex Environment—Octopuses Use Specific Features of Their Surroundings for Background Matching. PLoS ONE, 7(5). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0037579
- May 25, 2012
- 09:13 AM
- 4 views
DNA vaccines: a work in progress
You are all familiar with the idea behind vaccines: an attenuated form of the pathogen stimulates the immune system to produce T-cells and antibodies specific to that particular antigen. These immune responses then become part of our T- and B-memory cells, cells that have previously encountered a certain antigen and have already specialized to recognize it. The challenge behind a vaccine is to use a form of antigen that's weak enough so not to cause the actual disease, but strong enough so to pr........ Read more »
Ferraro, B., Morrow, M., Hutnick, N., Shin, T., Lucke, C., & Weiner, D. (2011) Clinical Applications of DNA Vaccines: Current Progress. Clinical Infectious Diseases, 53(3), 296-302. DOI: 10.1093/cid/cir334
- May 25, 2012
- 09:09 AM
- 6 views
When introductions go bad
by Sarah Stephen in An ecological oratorio
My first sighting of the red squirrel was in Camperdown Park in Dundee in 2003. I remember that scene vividly. I had since tried desperately to see this elusive animal again but to no avail, save a brief sighting, again in Camperdown Park, in Autumn 2010. This is because although red squirrel, which is native to UK and is protected in Europe, is outnumbered by its foreign relative, the grey squirrel that was introduced to the UK from America. G........ Read more »
Vitule JR. (2012) Ecology: Preserve Brazil's aquatic biodiversity. Nature, 485(7398), 309. PMID: 22596145
Eisenhauer N, Scheu S, & Jousset A. (2012) Bacterial diversity stabilizes community productivity. PloS one, 7(3). PMID: 22470577
- May 25, 2012
- 08:00 AM
- 1 view
Cochrane and a Significantly Biased Review of Steroids for acute spinal cord injury
by Rogue Medic in Rogue Medic
An interesting relic of trauma care is the use of steroids for the treatment of acute spinal cord injury. As with The Golden Hour, there are people still promoting this idea. In the words of Monty Python, it’s not quite dead, yet.
Who is promoting this idea? The Cochrane Collaboration.
Here is a list of the papers evaluated in this 2012 update of the 2009 Cochrane Review, which was an update of the 2002 Cochrane Review. There has been no change in the references, since the most recen........ Read more »
Bracken MB. (2012) Steroids for acute spinal cord injury. Cochrane database of systematic reviews (Online). PMID: 22258943
- May 25, 2012
- 03:04 AM
- 22 views
An Aboriginal Australian genome reveals separate human dispersals into Asia
by mrr in genome ecology evolution etc
This blog section concerns a trendy debate in science, the human population history, which has extensions into daily life, as it can constitutes a topic of general public curiosity. Therefore, let’s see what is contribution described herein.BackgroundModern human populations seems to be derived from a single African ancestral population, under the well supported “out of Africa” hypothesis (1). Particularly, for eastern Asian colonization a “single-dispersal” model have been hypothesiz........ Read more »
Rasmussen, M., Guo, X., Wang, Y., Lohmueller, K., Rasmussen, S., Albrechtsen, A., Skotte, L., Lindgreen, S., Metspalu, M., Jombart, T.... (2011) An Aboriginal Australian Genome Reveals Separate Human Dispersals into Asia. Science, 334(6052), 94-98. DOI: 10.1126/science.1211177
- May 25, 2012
- 12:46 AM
- 18 views
Ask Not What You Can Do For Educational Technology, But What Educational Technology Can Do For You
by erichorow in peer-reviewed by my neurons
It’s irritating that people talk about educational technology in terms of iPads in the classroom when the real impact will come from pinpoint differentiation, instant student assessment, and a third thing that nobody talks about – improved simulations in speciality learning. For example, medical students who use virtual patients — an “interactive computer simulation of real-life [...]... Read more »
Consorti, F., Mancuso, R., Nocioni, M., & Piccolo, A. (2012) Efficacy of virtual patients in medical education: A meta-analysis of randomized studies. Computers , 59(3), 1001-1008. DOI: 10.1016/j.compedu.2012.04.017
- May 25, 2012
- 12:07 AM
- 9 views
Delayed ACL Reconstructions may be Associated with More Severe Meniscal and Chondral Lesions
by Kyle Harris in Sports Medicine Research (SMR): In the Lab & In the Field
Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) ruptures often coincide with meniscal and cartilaginous injuries. These ruptures are generally treated with surgical reconstruction or non-surgical treatment. Patients who chose to delay surgical treatment may be at greater risk for increasing the severity of the associated injuries; however, this has not been demonstrated in the literature. Therefore, Fok and Yau completed a retrospective, comparative study investigating (1) if delaying ACL reconstruction is ass........ Read more »
Fok AW, & Yau WP. (2012) Delay in ACL reconstruction is associated with more severe and painful meniscal and chondral injuries. Knee Surgery, Sports Traumatology, Arthroscopy. PMID: 22552616
- May 24, 2012
- 11:50 PM
- 18 views
UK vs. US in Media Reporting on Eating Disorders: Who Does it Better?
by Tetyana Pekar in Science of Eating Disorders
Given the popularity of my post on how the media portrays eating disorders, I thought I’d do a follow-up post about a more recent and comprehensive study on media reporting of eating disorders. Shepherd & Seale (2010) wanted to build up on the findings of O’Hara & Clegg-Smith, but focusing on UK newspapers.... Read more »
Shepherd, E., & Seale, C. (2010) Eating disorders in the media: The changing nature of UK newspaper reports. European Eating Disorders Review, 18(6), 486-495. DOI: 10.1002/erv.1006
- May 24, 2012
- 05:36 PM
- 31 views
Hearing radio frequencies
by Patrick Mineault in xcorr
I was reading the Wikipedia article on tinnitus, and came across this pearl of a sentence: A common and often misdiagnosed condition that mimics tinnitus is Radio Frequency (RF) Hearing in which subjects have been tested and found to hear high-pitched transmission frequencies that sound similar to tinnitus. Hmm, what? Yes, humans, under special circumstances, [...]... Read more »
Elder, J., & Chou, C. (2003) Auditory response to pulsed radiofrequency energy. Bioelectromagnetics, 24(S6). DOI: 10.1002/bem.10163
- May 24, 2012
- 02:35 PM
- 19 views
Validation of the Dime
by Rogue Medic in Rogue Medic
The current Annals of Emergency Medicine has a pair of editorials on the article I wrote about[1] in This is the Way to Bad Medicine back in January. Dr. Radecki also was critical of this paper.[2] There is another study that refers to the same question published in this issue, but I will write about that paper later.
"These data raise the real question, Do such findings matter? By admitting more patients and ordering more CTs, do we improve outcomes? Or do we simply find more things tha........ Read more »
Menditto, V., Lucci, M., Polonara, S., Pomponio, G., & Gabrielli, A. (2012) Management of Minor Head Injury in Patients Receiving Oral Anticoagulant Therapy: A Prospective Study of a 24-Hour Observation Protocol. Annals of Emergency Medicine. DOI: 10.1016/j.annemergmed.2011.12.003
- May 24, 2012
- 02:18 PM
- 17 views
Paving the road with nanoclay
by Cath in Basal Science (BS) Clarified
Summer time means BBQ season but it’s also the start of road construction. Road construction usually leads to traffic jams and slowdowns, so it makes sense to avoid construction in [...]... Read more »
You, Z., Mills-Beale, J., Foley, J., Roy, S., Odegard, G., Dai, Q., & Goh, S. (2011) Nanoclay-modified asphalt materials: Preparation and characterization. Construction and Building Materials, 25(2), 1072-1078. DOI: 10.1016/j.conbuildmat.2010.06.070
- May 24, 2012
- 12:17 PM
- 21 views
Discovering underneath a “MudPit”
by Clay Clark in Biochem Blogs
What is referred to as “MudPit” here is not “a pit of mud” but a technique in the mass spectrometry field which stands for “multi-dimensional protein identification technology”, a very powerful approach that has been widely used since the … Continue reading →... Read more »
Washburn, M., Wolters, D., & Yates, J. (2001) Large-scale analysis of the yeast proteome via multidimensional protein identification technology. Nature Biotechnology, 19(3), 242-247. DOI: 10.1038/85686
Yang, F., Shen, Y., Camp, D., & Smith, R. (2012) High-pH reversed-phase chromatography with fraction concatenation for 2D proteomic analysis. Expert Review of Proteomics, 9(2), 129-134. DOI: 10.1586/epr.12.15
Tran, J., Zamdborg, L., Ahlf, D., Lee, J., Catherman, A., Durbin, K., Tipton, J., Vellaichamy, A., Kellie, J., Li, M.... (2011) Mapping intact protein isoforms in discovery mode using top-down proteomics. Nature, 480(7376), 254-258. DOI: 10.1038/nature10575
- May 24, 2012
- 11:49 AM
- 40 views
Embarrassing Conditions: The Living Dead
by Carian Thus in United Academics
Imagine how horrific life would be when you are convinced to be dead, while you are still alive. This delusional belief of non-existence characterizes sufferers of the rare mental disorder Cotard Delusion. Slight variations include those that believe they are rotting or have lost their blood or internal organs.... Read more »
Debruyne H, Portzky M, Van den Eynde F, & Audenaert K. (2009) Cotard's syndrome: a review. Current psychiatry reports, 11(3), 197-202. PMID: 19470281
- May 24, 2012
- 11:15 AM
- 10 views
Clockworks: The Story of Drugs — Part 1
by xylph in xylem || phloem
In this installment, I will discuss why it is difficult to discover, design and develop a drug, in view of our current knowledge of physiology.With numerous, intertwined reactions happening, our body is a complex clockwork of biomachinery gears. What do you do, then, if some gears fail—that is, if you got sick? On one hand, it is a consolation that many gears are what biologists call 'redundant', which means that it's alright that a certain gear fails, because there are other gears that can ta........ Read more »
Eckert, D., & Kim, P. (2001) Mechanisms of Viral Membrane Fusion and Its Inhibition. Annual Review of Biochemistry, 70(1), 777-810. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.biochem.70.1.777
Welsch, M., Snyder, S., & Stockwell, B. (2010) Privileged scaffolds for library design and drug discovery. Current Opinion in Chemical Biology, 14(3), 347-361. DOI: 10.1016/j.cbpa.2010.02.018
Marusyk A, Almendro V, & Polyak K. (2012) Intra-tumour heterogeneity: a looking glass for cancer?. Nature reviews. Cancer, 12(5), 323-34. PMID: 22513401
- May 24, 2012
- 08:55 AM
- 20 views
Robotics & Mechanical Limbs
by Jason Carr in Wired Cosmos
As people continue to struggle with problems involving organ donation, a few robotic engineers continue to push the boundaries between humanity and machinery. A recent report in Nature (cited below) showed that two patients were able to overcome some aspects of their paralysis by way of an implant. Reaching and grabbing motions were possible by way [...]... Read more »
Hochberg, L., Bacher, D., Jarosiewicz, B., Masse, N., Simeral, J., Vogel, J., Haddadin, S., Liu, J., Cash, S., van der Smagt, P.... (2012) Reach and grasp by people with tetraplegia using a neurally controlled robotic arm. Nature, 485(7398), 372-375. DOI: 10.1038/nature11076
- May 24, 2012
- 08:34 AM
- 24 views
Winning at hide and seek in the mesopelagic
by Mostly Open Ocean in Mostly Open Ocean
A paper published a few months ago in Current Biology serves to highlight just how amazing cephalopods (squid, cuttlefish, octopus and their kin) are. The paper concerns how two species of cephalopods (Japetella heathi an octopus and Onychoteuthis banksii a squid) have evolved to avoid predators in the dynamic light environment of the mesopelagic layer of the open ocean.The mesopelagic layer of the ocean extends from 200 meters to 1000 meters deep. Sunlight in this zone transitions from present,........ Read more »
Zylinski, S., & Johnsen, S. (2011) Mesopelagic cephalopods switch between transparency and pigmentation to optimize camouflage in the deep. Current Biology, 21(22), 1937-1941. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2011.10.014
- May 24, 2012
- 06:40 AM
- 26 views
ADHD Summer Camp
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
For harassed doctors and stressed-out parents, it can be tempting to treat a challenging child with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) with pills and leave it at that. After all, early results from the one of the largest trials of its kind in the United States - the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD (MTA) - showed that behavioural outcomes were better for children given the psychostimulant Ritalin, than for those given psychological treatment. However, follow-up dat........ Read more »
Gerber, W., Gerber-von Müller, G., Andrasik, F., Niederberger, U., Siniatchkin, M., Kowalski, J., Petermann, U., & Petermann, F. (2012) The impact of a multimodal Summer Camp Training on neuropsychological functioning in children and adolescents with ADHD: An exploratory study. Child Neuropsychology, 18(3), 242-255. DOI: 10.1080/09297049.2011.599115
- May 24, 2012
- 05:06 AM
- 33 views
Armored Lizard Through a CT Scan
by Jaime Menchén in United Academics
This image is a reconstruction of a lizard’s skeleton in three dimensions, showing how the ‘armor’ is formed.... Read more »
Greenbaum, E., Stanley, E., Kusamba, C., Moninga, W., Goldberg, S., & Bursey, C. (2012) A new species of (Squamata: Cordylidae) from the Marungu Plateau of south-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. African Journal of Herpetology, 61(1), 14-39. DOI: 10.1080/21564574.2012.666505
- May 24, 2012
- 04:34 AM
- 45 views
Getting to the root of Type II diabetes... with liquorice?
by John Ankers in Too Many Live Wires
The liquorice root is full of surprises. Chewed as a breath freshener in Italy and a sweet in Sweden (and the north of England), this little brown stick has also been used as a remedy for mouth ulcers for thousands of years.
New research has identified a natural chemical extracted from the liquorice root that could be used to treat Type II diabetes.... Read more »
Weidner, C., de Groot, J., Prasad, A., Freiwald, A., Quedenau, C., Kliem, M., Witzke, A., Kodelja, V., Han, C., Giegold, S.... (2012) From the Cover: Amorfrutins are potent antidiabetic dietary natural products. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(19), 7257-7262. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1116971109
- May 24, 2012
- 03:57 AM
- 33 views
Physics or Stamp Collecting? Let’s hear it for the Stamp Collectors
by Duncan Hull in O'Really?
The Life Scientific is a series of interviews by Jim Al-Khalili of well known scientists. It’s a bit like Desert Island Discs without the music and with more interesting guests. If you missed them on the radio, you can download the lot as a podcast. Here’s a good example of an interview with John Sulston on the Physics vs. Stamp Collecting debate:... Read more »
Ihde, A. (1964) Rutherford at Manchester (Birks, J. B., ed.). Journal of Chemical Education, 41(11). DOI: 10.1021/ed041pA896
Birks, J., & Segrè, E. (1963) Rutherford at Manchester. Physics Today, 16(12), 71. DOI: 10.1063/1.3050668
Goldhammer, P. (1963) Rutherford at Manchester. J. B. Birks, Ed. Heywood, London, 1962; Benjamon, New York, 1963. x 364 pp. Illus. $ 12.50. Science, 142(3594), 943-944. DOI: 10.1126/science.142.3594.943-a
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