Friday Fun: Kitten’s Curiosity Gets it Stuck and Mom Comes to Help

Posted on September 28, 2012  Comments (4)

This kitten’s curiosity led it up a tree, but then it didn’t know what to do next. Mom comes to the rescue and kitten follows her lead.

Related: Kittens Being Rescued by Their Mother – Cat Goes to the Train Station to Meet Its Owner Each Evening – Cat Parkour – Treadmill Cats

Toyota Human Support Robot

Posted on September 25, 2012  Comments (10)

Toyota continues to develop their partner robot initiative. Demographics in Japan make a compelling case for the need to provide solutions to those who need assistance to support independent living.

The aim is to contribute to the maintenance and improvement of quality of life.

In cooperation of the Yokohama Rehabilitation Center, Toyota conducted experiments for disabled people, using HSR in their homes, in 2011. Toyota has been integrating the feedback to the design, based on actual user experience.

The Human Support Robot (HSR) can pick up something on and bring it to the person. Also it can do small tasks such as opening the curtains.

Controlling the robot can be done easily, by using the voice recognition function or using a tablet control. In addition, Toyota is designing it to directly assist the person, helping them get into and out of a bathtub, for example.

They are also developing new features for remote viewing and remote operation (to provide off site help to make the robot more useful). They are working with health care professionals, including nurses, and research institutions aimed at practical use for such a robot.

Toyota, along with several other Japanese companies, continue to invest a great deal to create personal care robots.

Related: Toyota Partner Robots – Toyota Develops Thought-controlled Wheelchair – Honda’s Robolegs Help People Walk – Toyota Winglet, Personal Transportation

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Did a massive comet explode over Canada 12,900 years ago and start an ice age?

Posted on September 22, 2012  Comments (2)

I think it is important to increase scientific literacy. One thing that is greatly misunderstood is the process for new scientific explanations being accepted by the scientific community. It is often quite a drawn out process over years (and for the explanation provided in this paper the debate is certainly still ongoing). And for issues that really shake up past explanations it can take decades and be quite contentious. I think posts tagged with “scientific inquiry” are a very interesting collection to explore.

It is important to understand the difficulty in providing evidence that satisfies the overwhelming majority of the scientific experts in any area. And it is important to understand the claims in one (or numerous papers) are not the accepted proven wisdom of the scientific community. Thankfully the process is rigorous. While mistakes can still be made, the evidence needed to substantiate a scientific hypothesis is significant. Their is still plenty of room for position to color accepted scientific wisdom. A respected professor is often able to make a claim that is more readily accepted and even more-so for to insist the new claims do not provide enough evidence in support of them to accept the new claims and have there position accepted (even when it really shouldn’t be looking just at the facts).

Topper site in middle of comet controversy

Firestone found concentrations of spherules (micro-sized balls) of metals and nano-sized diamonds in a layer of sediment dating 12,900 years ago at 10 of 12 archaeological sites that his team examined. The mix of particles is thought to be the result of an extraterrestrial object, such as a comet or meteorite, exploding in the earth’s atmosphere. Among the sites examined was USC’s Topper, one of the most pristine U.S. sites for research on Clovis, one of the earliest ancient peoples.
“This independent study is yet another example of how the Topper site with its various interdisciplinary studies has connected ancient human archaeology with significant studies of the Pleistocene,” said Goodyear, who began excavating Clovis artifacts in 1984 at the Topper site in Allendale, S.C. “It’s both exciting and gratifying.”
Younger-Dryas is what scientists refer to as the period of extreme cooling that began around 12,900 years ago and lasted 1,300 years. While that brief ice age has been well-documented – occurring during a period of progressive solar warming after the last ice age – the reasons for it have long remained unclear.

Related: Why Wasn’t the Earth Covered in Ice 4 Billion Years Ago – When the Sun was Dimmer? – Unless We Take Decisive Action, Climate Change Will Ravage Our Planet – More Evidence Supporting Einstein’s Theory of Gravity – Ancient Whale Uncovered in Egyptian Desert

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Key Indicator for Malignant Melanoma Found

Posted on September 20, 2012  Comments (2)

Skin cancer detection breakthrough

The researchers found that certain biochemical elements in the DNA of normal pigment-producing skin cells and benign mole cells are absent in melanoma cells. Loss of these methyl groups — known as 5-hmC — in skin cells serves as a key indicator for malignant melanoma. Loss corresponded to more-advanced stages of melanoma as well as clinical outcome.

Strikingly, researchers were able to reverse melanoma growth in preclinical studies. When the researchers introduced enzymes responsible for 5-hmC formation to melanoma cells lacking the biochemical element, they saw that the cells stopped growing.

“It is difficult to repair the mutations in the actual DNA sequence that are believed to cause cancer,” said Christine Lian, a physician-scientist in the Department of Pathology at BWH and one of the lead authors. “So having discovered that we can reverse tumor cell growth by potentially repairing a biochemical defect that exists — not within the sequence but just outside of it on the DNA structure — provides a promising new melanoma treatment approach for the medical community to explore.”

Because cancer is traditionally regarded as a genetic disease involving permanent defects that directly affect the DNA sequence, this new finding of a potentially reversible abnormality that surrounds the DNA (thus termed “epigenetic”) is a hot topic in cancer research, according to the researchers.

In the United States, melanoma is the fifth most common type of new cancer diagnosis in men and the seventh most common type in women. The National Cancer Institute estimates that in 2012 there will be 76,250 new cases and 9,180 deaths in the United States owing to melanoma.

Thankfully scientists keep making great progress in understanding and finding potential clues to treating cancer. And big gains have been made in treating some cancers over the last few decades. But the research successes remain difficult to turn into effective solutions in treating patients.

I am thankful we have so many scientists doing good work in this difficult and important area (cancer).

Related: Webcast of a T-cell Killing a Cancerous Cell – Nanoparticles With Scorpion Venom Slow Cancer Spread – DNA Passed to Descendants Changed by Your Life – Researchers Find Switch That Allows Cancer Cells to Spread

Science Explained: Cool Video of ATP Synthase, Which Provides Usable Energy to Us

Posted on September 17, 2012  Comments (2)

This webcast shows animations of ATP synthase structure and the mechanism for synthesizing ATP. Biology is incredibly cool. Too bad they didn’t have stuff like this when I was in school, instead biology was mainly about memorizing boring lists of stuff.

ATP (adenosine tri-phosphate) transports chemical energy within cells. When one of the phosphates is released by ATP energy is given off (and ATP becomes ADP (adenosine di-phosphate) + Pi (inorganic phosphate). And then the synthase structure can then turn it back into ATP to be used again.

The human body, which on average contains only 250 grams of ATP, turns over its own body weight equivalent in ATP each day.

Related: ATP synthase lecture notes University of Illinois – Webcast on the makeup and function of eukaryotic cells – Science Explained: Photosynthesis – Video showing malaria breaking into cell

Should Giant Viruses Be Included on the Tree of Life?

Posted on September 14, 2012  Comments (1)

A new study of giant viruses supports the idea that viruses are ancient living organisms and not inanimate molecular remnants. The study may reshape the universal family tree, adding a fourth major branch to the three that most scientists agree represent the fundamental domains of life. But I am not sure that makes sense. The reason given for viruses not being “life” is that they cannot reproduce themselves – they hijack living cells to reproduce. The research in the past history of viruses as they evolved into current viruses is interesting but I don’t see the reason to classify current viruses as life.

The researchers used a relatively new method to peer into the distant past. Rather than comparing genetic sequences, which are unstable and change rapidly over time, they looked for evidence of past events in the three-dimensional, structural domains of proteins. These structural motifs, called folds, are relatively stable molecular fossils that – like the fossils of human or animal bones – offer clues to ancient evolutionary events, said University of Illinois crop sciences and Institute for Genomic Biology professor Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, who led the analysis.

“Just like paleontologists, we look at the parts of the system and how they change over time,” Caetano-Anollés said. Some protein folds appear only in one group or in a subset of organisms, he said, while others are common to all organisms studied so far.

“We make a very basic assumption that structures that appear more often and in more groups are the most ancient structures,” he said.

Most efforts to document the relatedness of all living things have left viruses out of the equation, Caetano-Anollés said.

“We’ve always been looking at the Last Universal Common Ancestor by comparing cells,” he said. “We never added viruses. So we put viruses in the mix to see where these viruses came from.”

The researchers conducted a census of all the protein folds occurring in more than 1,000 organisms representing bacteria, viruses, the microbes known as archaea, and all other living things. The researchers included giant viruses because these viruses are large and complex, with genomes that rival – and in some cases exceed – the genetic endowments of the simplest bacteria, Caetano-Anollés said.

Related: Plants, Unikonts, Excavates and SARs – Bacteriophages: The Most Common Life-Like Form on Earth – 8 Percent of the Human Genome is Old Virus Genes – Microbes Retroviruses

Open access paper: Giant Viruses Coexisted With the Cellular Ancestors and Represent a Distinct Supergroup Along With Superkingdoms Archaea, Bacteria and Eukarya

The discovery of giant viruses with genome and physical size comparable to cellular organisms, remnants of protein translation machinery and virus-specific parasites (virophages) have raised intriguing questions about their origin. Evidence advocates for their inclusion into global phylogenomic studies and their consideration as a distinct and ancient form of life.
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Results call for a change in the way viruses are perceived. They likely represent a distinct form of life that either predated or coexisted with the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) and constitute a very crucial part of our planet’s biosphere.

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Man in Coma for 7 Years was Given a Sleeping Pill and Woke Up

Posted on September 9, 2012  Comments (3)

Lazarus pill miracle for E Cape man, 9 September 2012

After reading a report in City Press last month, his wife, Nomfundo, insisted that he be given a prescription for the sleeping pill Stilnox, which has the opposite effect on those with brain injuries.

It worked – and brought him out of a seven-year coma.
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But on August 12, family friend Nceba Mokoena came across an article in City Press about a miracle recovery made by another car crash victim, hundreds of kilometres away in Gauteng.

Louis Viljoen was given the sleeping pill by chance by his mother, Sienie.

She had noticed he wasn’t sleeping peacefully and asked her doctor if she could give him half a sleeping tablet. After she did, Louis opened his eyes and said “Hello Mamma”, his first words in five years.

Very cool anecdote and example that modern medicine has many miraculous cures but the medical system can’t always use them as well as we would hope. Even with all the knowledge we have today just getting that information into the right doctor’s minds is very hard. And the complexity of diagnoses and interactions makes medical care still an art as well as a science.

So is this just some freak accident. Partially, in the mother giving her son a sleeping pill to reduce his seeming restlessness in the coma. But the effect of Stilnox in bringing coma victims out of a coma has been documented previously.

Reborn from persistent vegetative state, 12 September 2006

Four three years, Riaan Bolton has lain motionless, his eyes open but unseeing. After a devastating car crash doctors said he would never again see or speak or hear. Now his mother, Johanna, dissolves a pill in a little water on a teaspoon and forces it gently into his mouth. Within half an hour, as if a switch has been flicked in his brain, Riaan looks around his home in the South African town of Kimberley and says, “Hello.” Shortly after his accident, Johanna had turned down the option of letting him die.

Three hundred miles away, Louis Viljoen, a young man who had once been cruelly described by a doctor as “a cabbage”, greets me with a mischievous smile and a streetwise four-move handshake. Until he took the pill, he too was supposed to be in what doctors call a persistent vegetative state.

Across the Atlantic in the United States, George Melendez, who is also brain-damaged, has lain twitching and moaning as if in agony for years, causing his parents unbearable grief. He, too, is given this little tablet and again, it’s as if a light comes on. His father asks him if he is, indeed, in pain. “No,” George smiles, and his family burst into tears.

It all sounds miraculous, you might think. And in a way, it is. But this is not a miracle medication, the result of groundbreaking neurological research. Instead, these awakenings have come as the result of an accidental discovery by a dedicated – and bewildered – GP. They have all woken up, paradoxically, after being given a commonly used sleeping pill.

Medical care is still today an extremely difficult area where highly trained and continuously learning doctors still have a great deal of trouble keeping up with the latest medical knowledge.

Related: Hospital Reform, IHI’s efforts to get good practices adopted – Norway Reduces Infections by Reducing Antibiotic Use – Majority of Clinical Trials Don’t Provide Meaningful Evidence – Continual Learning – Physical Activity for Adults: Inactivity Leads to 5.3 Million Early Deaths a Year

Bird Using Bread as Bait to Catch Fish

Posted on September 3, 2012  Comments (7)

Very clever technique. Quite an effective strategy to take a byproduct of people (bread) and use it to lure in your prey. I posted another bird fishing using bait webcast previously: that post includes links to more such videos.

Related: Orangutan Attempts to Hunt Fish with Spear – Dolphins Using Tools to Hunt – Intelligent Dolphin Strategy for Hunting Fish