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The last line calls to mind the recent Royal Society of Chemistry attempt to reclaim the word chemical from the advertising and marketing industries: £1,000,000 for 100% chemical free material. A good example for our scientific literacy posts.
Photo by Justin Hunter.
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Harvard researchers gain new insight into aging
Scientists have long known that aging causes gene expression to change, and DNA damage to accumulate. But now, research led by Harvard Medical School scientists explains the connection between the two processes in mammals.
The paper, published in the journal Cell, found that a multi-tasking protein called SIRT1 that normally acts as guardian of the genome gets dragged away to DNA fix-it jobs. When the protein abandons its normal post to work as a genetic handyman, order unravels elsewhere in the cell. Genes that are normally under its careful watch begin to flip on.
“What this paper actually implies is that aspects of aging may be reversible,” said David Sinclair, a Harvard Medical School biologist who led the research. “It sounds crazy, but in principle it should be possible to restore the youthful set of genes, the patterns that are on and off.”
The study is just the latest to draw yet more attention to sirtuins, proteins involved in the aging process
Aging is fascinating. By and large people just accept it. We see it happen to those all around us, without exception. But what causes biological aging? It is an interesting area of research.
Related: lobsters show no apparent signs of aging - Our Genome Changes as We Age - Millennials in our Lifetime? - Radical Life Extension - posts on cells
I am not a huge fan of wild animal pets but this one is pretty cool. I still think they are crazy, Hippos kill more people than any animal in Africa, that isn’t what I look for in a house-guest (well actually people kill a lot more people than any animal but still…). It is pretty cool the Hippo is free to go between wild and their home and does so.
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Declines in Cancer Incidence and Death Rates in report from the National Cancer Institute and CDC:
Brawley and others cautioned, however, that part of the reduction could be the result of fewer people getting screened for prostate and breast cancers. In addition, the rates at which many other types of cancer are being diagnosed are still increasing
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Some experts said the drop was not surprising, noting that it was primarily the result of a fall in lung cancer because of declines in smoking that occurred decades ago. They criticized the ongoing focus on detecting and treating cancer and called for more focus on prevention.
“The whole cancer establishment has been focused on treatment, which has not been terribly productive,” said John C. Bailar III, who studies cancer trends at the National Academy of Sciences. “I think what people should conclude from this is we ought to be putting most of our resources where we know there has been progress, almost in spite of what we’ve done, and stop this single-minded focus on treatment.”
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This is a post from my Curious Cat Investing and Economics Blog: Financial Thanksgiving. I have tweaked a bit to tie into appropriate technology since that is the related area to me on this blog.
For me, giving back to others is part of my personal financial plan. As I have said most people that are actually able to read this are financially much better off than billions of other people today. At least they have the potential to be if they don’t chose to live beyond their means. Here are some of the ways I give back to others.
Kiva is a wonderful organization and particularly well suited to discuss because they do a great job of using the internet to make the experience rewarding for people looking to help - as I have mentioned before: Reducing Poverty. One of my goals for this blog is to increase the number of readers participating in Kiva - see current Curious Cat Kivans. I have also created a lending team on Kiva. Kiva added a feature that allows people to connect online. When you make a loan you may link you loan to a group.
I actually give more to Trickle Up, I have been giving to them for a long time. They appeal to my same desire to help people help themselves. I believe in the power of capitalism and people to provide long term increases in standards of living. I love the idea of providing support that grows over time. I like investing and reaping the rewards myself later (with investment I make for myself). But I also like to do that with my gifts. I would like to be able to provide opportunities to many people and have many of them take advantage of that to build a better life for themselves, their families and their children.
The photo shows Frew Wube, Haimanot and Melkan (brother and two sisters), an entrepreneur that received a grant from Trickle up. Trickle Up provides grants to entrepreneur, similar to micro loans, except the entrepreneur does not have to pay back the grant. They are able to use the full funds to invest in their business and use all the income they are able to generate to increase their standard of living and re-invest in the business.
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| Adaptive Flight Control With Living Neuronal Networks on Microelectrode Arrays (open access paper) by Thomas B. DeMarse and Karl P. Dockendorf Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Florida
investigating the ability of living neurons to act as a set of neuronal weights which were used to control the flight of a simulated aircraft. These weights were manipulated via high frequency stimulation inputs to produce a system in which a living neuronal network would “learn” to control an aircraft for straight and level flight.
A system was created in which a network of living rat cortical neurons were slowly adapted to control an aircraft’s flight trajectory. This was accomplished by using high frequency stimulation pulses delivered to two independent channels, one for pitch, and one for roll. This relatively simple system was able to control the pitch and roll of a simulated aircraft. |
When Dr. Thomas DeMarse first puts the neurons in the dish, they look like little more than grains of sand sprinkled in water. However, individual neurons soon begin to extend microscopic lines toward each other, making connections that represent neural processes. “You see one extend a process, pull it back, extend it out — and it may do that a couple of times, just sampling who’s next to it, until over time the connectivity starts to establish itself,” he said. “(The brain is) getting its network to the point where it’s a live computation device.”
To control the simulated aircraft, the neurons first receive information from the computer about flight conditions: whether the plane is flying straight and level or is tilted to the left or to the right. The neurons then analyze the data and respond by sending signals to the plane’s controls. Those signals alter the flight path and new information is sent to the neurons, creating a feedback system.
“Initially when we hook up this brain to a flight simulator, it doesn’t know how to control the aircraft,” DeMarse said. “So you hook it up and the aircraft simply drifts randomly. And as the data come in, it slowly modifies the (neural) network so over time, the network gradually learns to fly the aircraft.”
Although the brain currently is able to control the pitch and roll of the simulated aircraft in weather conditions ranging from blue skies to stormy, hurricane-force winds, the underlying goal is a more fundamental understanding of how neurons interact as a network, DeMarse said.
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Engineers Rule, 2006
I checked and Honda was also profitable in 2007 and 2008 fiscal year (ending in September).
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Death bloom of plankton a warning on warming by David Perlman
Every spring and summer, phytoplankton in the Arctic blooms richly in explosive pulses, nourished by nitrogen and phosphorous in the seawater, and when those chemicals are consumed, the blooms end, Arrigo said.
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The panel starts speaking at about minute 14. The technical presentation of the video could be better (likely will be as we develop good, easy ways to capture speaking events for web delivery) but their is some interesting content.
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The broken window theory is that as the visible deterioration of an area (broken windows, graffiti, lettering…) takes place, crime will increase. And that this starts a cycle of decline for the area feeds upon itself (a negatively reinforcing loop in system thinking parlance). The theory was put forth in an article in The Atlantic in 1982 by George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson.
Criminology Can the can, The Economist
The researchers’ conclusion is that one example of disorder, like graffiti or littering, can indeed encourage another, like stealing. Dr Kelling was right. The message for policymakers and police officers is that clearing up graffiti or littering promptly could help fight the spread of crime.
Related: A Crack in the Broken-Windows Theory - Broken Windows Turns 25 - Reconsidering the ‘Broken Windows’ Theory - Credit Freeze Stops Identity Theft Cold
“This opens up a whole new door in thinking about how chips could be designed and operated,” Williams says.
Engineers could, for example, develop a new kind of computer memory that would supplement and eventually replace today’s commonly used dynamic random access memory (D-RAM). Computers using conventional D-RAM lack the ability to retain information once they are turned off. When power is restored to a D-RAM-based computer, a slow, energy-consuming “boot-up” process is necessary to retrieve data stored on a magnetic disk required to run the system.
Related: How Computers Boot Up - Nanotechnology Breakthroughs for Computer Chips - Delaying the Flow of Light on a Silicon Chip - Self-assembling Nanotechnology in Chip Manufacturing
The National Girls Collaborative Project for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) collaborates with those seeking to increase the participation of girls in STEM feeder activities. The goal is to encourage girls to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math.
I support programs encouraging STEM activities for girls - and boys. NSF data shows for 2005 shows women outnumbered men in undergraduate degree in science and engineering. For post-graduate degrees men still outnumbering women but that gap has been reducing and seems like it will continue to. And the representations in the workplace seem poised to continue to show a reducing number of men and increasing number of women. Engineering is an example of an area with far more men than women graduating - the imbalance is equivalent to the imbalance the other way for psychology.
Related: Girls Sweep Top Honors at Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology - FIRST Robotics in Minnesota - Kids in the Lab: Getting High-Schoolers Hooked on Science
Discovery of Giant Roaming Deep Sea Protist Provides New Perspective on Animal Evolution
Biologist Mikhail “Misha” Matz and his colleagues recently discovered the grape-sized protists and their complex tracks on the ocean floor near the Bahamas. DNA analysis confirmed that the giant protist found by Matz and his colleagues in the Bahamas is Gromia sphaerica, a species previously known only from the Arabian Sea.
Matz says the protists probably move by sending leg-like extensions, called pseudopodia, out of their cells in all directions. The pseudopodia then grab onto mud in one direction and the organism rolls that way, leaving a track. Hr says the giant protists’ bubble-like body design is probably one of the planet’s oldest macroscopic body designs, which may have existed for 1.8 billion years.
“I personally think now that the whole Precambrian may have been exclusively the reign of protists,” says Matz. “Our observations open up this possible way of interpreting the Precambrian fossil record.”
He says the appearance of all the animal body plans during the Cambrian explosion might not just be an artifact of the fossil record. There are likely other mechanisms that explain the burst-like origin of diverse multicellular life forms.
Single-Celled Giant Upends Early Evolution
A distant relative of microscopic amoebas, the grape-sized Gromia sphaerica was discovered once before, lying motionless at the bottom of the Arabian Sea. But when Mikhail Matz of the University of Texas at Austin and a group of researchers stumbled across a group of G. sphaerica off the coast of the Bahamas, the creatures were leaving trails behind them up to 50 centimeters (20 inches) long in the mud.
The trouble is, single-celled critters aren’t supposed to be able to leave trails. The oldest fossils of animal trails, called ‘trace fossils’, date to around 580 million years ago, and paleontologists always figured they must have been made by multicellular animals with complex, symmetrical bodies.
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A penguin takes sanctuary on a boat while killer whales circle.
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Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card has just been published. It is the ninth book in the Ender Wiggen series that began with Ender’s Game (Hugo and Nebula book award winner). I love the Ender series and have a table showing the sequence of the books. The books have not been published in the order of events in the fictional world. Ender in Exile is directly follows Ender’s Game (which makes it 3rd in story order - since Ender’s Shadow took place concurrently with Ender’s Game).
You can listen to Orson Scott Card read from Ender in Exile.
I include this post because I enjoyed the book. It doesn’t really have much to do with science or engineering but here is a quote from the book (page 106): “Besides, that’s what science was - the sharing of information the pooling of knowledge. That’s my gene pool, Afriama, he thought. The meme pool, the collective knowledge of science. What I discover here, what I learn, the problems I solve - those will be my children.”
Enjoy the book, and if you have not read Ender’s Game I highly recommend it. You can read the original Ender’s Game short story online. And if you haven’t read The Investment Counselor (about Jane, Ender’s computer companion) it is excellent (included in First Meetings in Ender’s Universe)
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The United States Department of Education’s Minority Science and Engineering Improvement Program (MSEIP) provides funds to schools to provide awards to students. 20 new awards (average value of $139,000) were awarded this year. That brings total funding this year to 71 awards (50 continue from previous years). Institutions recieving funds include: Clark Atlanta University, Rust College, New Mexico State University, Spelman College, Virginia State University and the College of Menominee Nation.
The program is designed to effect long-range improvement in science at predominantly minority and engineering education programs to increase the participation of underrepresented ethnic minorities, particularly minority women, into scientific and technological careers.
Wiley College, one of the new recipients, aims to increase the number of science majors, especially in the fields of biology and chemistry. A key feature of this grant is the creation of a high school science competition that will allow local and regional high school students to visit the campus and compete in a variety of scientific events.
This event will bring five area high schools together to compete in ten scientific events based on biology, chemistry, mathematics and physics. Individual first-place winners will be given scholarships to Wiley College. There will also be an overall grand champion awarded. This event will allow high school students to experience life at Wiley College and the possibilities of a career in science.
“This event not only gives students a financial reason to enroll at Wiley, but also allows them to become familiar with the campus and its faculty and students, said Dr. Shumate. “This grant also furthers a connection between Wiley and both the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Arkansas, allowing current Wiley students to attend these schools in the summer for biomedical research.”
Wiley hosts HS science competition Saturday
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