An Alaskan beetle (Upis ceramboides) climbs a fragment of bark. A new study at the University of Notre Dame has isolated antifreeze molecules in freeze-tolerant animals. Scientists were previously baffled as to how insects exposed to sub-zero temperatures could survive in the extreme cold.

I delved into WORLDmag.com for ideas for this post and found an opinion piece by Warren Cole Smith about the ongoing “War on Christmas.”

First of all, Jesus is most certainly not the reason for the orgiastic spending spree modern Christmas has become. I certainly think anyone should be able to say “Merry Christmas” if he or she wants to. But given what this holiday has become, there’s a part of me—a big part of me—that wants to keep the Jesus I worship as far away from this commercial debauchery as possible.

Secondly, there are the words themselves. “Christmas” is derived from “Christ’s Mass,” an expression first recorded in the 11th century. “Holiday” is a word derived from “holy day,” an expression that likely has an even more ancient, and no less religious, derivation. Indeed, the phrase “Merry Christmas” was unknown until the 16th century, and it connoted the idea of a Christmas that was—shall we say—festive. In other words, “Merry Christmas” may have been a medieval euphemism for “bottoms-up.”

And, he points out, the advertising they need to “Keep Christ in Christmas” costs money to make, and therefore costs money to buy. Just look at all the crap available via World Net Daily and that’s just bumper stickers.

What was once a quiet and solemn occasion to honor the birth of a baby has become completely commercialized and above and beyond everything the original holy Christian day had been set aside for.

The bottom line here is, well, the bottom line: The Christmas wars are a financial windfall for the organizations that whip up this frenzy. The Christmas wars have become, ironically, the ultimate commercialization of Christmas.

I’m not saying that there are times when we Christians shouldn’t stand up for our rights, but when we fire all our weapons in such a meaningless skirmish, we alienate potential allies, and we have no ammunition for the battles that matter.

Huge challenges face our culture and the Christian church: abortion, pornography, same-sex marriage. These are battles worth fighting, battles we must win, battles with too few warriors in the fight. And we’re wasting our time with “Merry Christmas vs. Happy Holidays”? Our priorities are badly out of whack.

Including all the priorities he just mentioned, as far as I’m concerned. This is totally off the topic of my post, but those are battles I hope they don’t win because the world needs to move beyond the biblical rules about marriage and sex that are ridiculously out of date and have no bearing on the reality of daily life for the rest of the population that doesn’t believe every word of that book. Secularism isn’t evil incarnate and it’s troublesome to see Christian groups trying to enforce rules that restrict everyone, just because their groups claim it’s “wrong.”

There is no good reason to ban gay marriage. It cannot wreck the sanctity of a heterosexual marriage unless one partner finally admits he or she is gay and seeks divorce. Just because it’s a “sin” in a Christian’s eye doesn’t mean it has to be illegal. Gambling and alcohol also lead to “sin,” do they not? It’s still legal to get drunk and lose money. Sins have no legal standing, no matter how much Christians might wish it so.

There is no good reason to say all abortion must be illegal. Better it all be legal and full of rules that must be followed to the letter and make the whole procedure above board and safe for any woman who feels the need to seek it out. There are good reasons to have this option available and perhaps women can be counseled if they have bad reasons. Rabbits, hares and coyotes have a far more sensible arrangement than we do, that actually reflects the ability of their environments to sustain their populations.

There is no good reason to be against the advertising and filming of sex, unless the battle is against stuff that involves children or sadistic violence against women. Sex is not unnatural nor should it be considered a sin. That kind of thinking is what likely leads to so many sexual hangups. What goes on between consenting adults is up to those adults, and those adults alone. I agree there is a lot of sexuality in advertising that kids will see, though. It is up to consumers to bully advertisers into changing their advertising methods. If enough people stand up to say enough is enough, maybe they’ll stop seducing people into buying a commercialized wet dream.

Which brings us back to commercialized Christmas, after all. Decide for yourself what the reason for the season is and live it as best you can.

It is completely unnecessary to insist others follow your lead. They might do so anyway, but at least the choice will be theirs.

Dr. Bernard Thébaud lives in two very different worlds. As a specialist in the Stollery Children’s Hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the Royal Alexandra Hospital, he cares for tiny babies, many of whom struggle for breath after being born weeks before they are due. Across town, in his laboratory in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Alberta, Dr. Thébaud dons a lab coat and peers into a microscope to examine the precise effect of stem cells on the lungs.Today, with his scientific research being published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, Dr. Thébaud has made a significant leap to bridge the gap between those two worlds.

An international team of scientists led by Dr. Thébaud has demonstrated for the first time that stem cells protect and repair the lungs of newborn rats. “The really exciting thing that we discovered was that stem cells are like little factories, pumping out healing factors,” says Dr. Thébaud, an Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research Clinical Scholar. “That healing liquid seems to boost the power of the healthy lung cells and helps them to repair the lungs.”

In this study, Thébaud’s team simulated the conditions of prematurity – giving the newborn rats oxygen. The scientists then took stem cells, derived from bone marrow, and injected them into the rats’ airways. Two weeks later, the rats treated with stem cells were able to run twice as far, and had better survival rates. When Thébaud’s team looked at the lungs, they found the stem cells had repaired the lungs, and prevented further damage.

“I want to congratulate Dr. Thébaud and his team. This research offers real hope for a new treatment for babies with chronic lung disease,” says Dr. Roberta Ballard, professor of pediatrics, University of California, San Francisco. “In a few short years, I anticipate we will be able to take these findings and begin clinical trials with premature babies.”

- via EurkaAlert

When  studying neurobiology and consciousness, I came across the idea that consciousness is epiphenominal, that is, a side effect of the brain which does not influence the body. A strange idea, certainly. Oddly, scientific data supports the notion that conscious experience is created by non-conscious processes in the brain.

When we make a choice, for example, science has showed that our brain chooses before we do.  How can free will exist if your brain already chooses before you do with your supposed free will?

If you find the idea that “you” are an illusion, you will not want to read the following:

The denial of one’s own existence might seem a desperate philosophical strategy, but denying the reality of the self is a line which a number of people have taken, and Thomas Metzinger is prominent among them.

By Peter Hankins

The thesis of his massive 2003 work is summed up in the title: Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. In that book, Metzinger made a commendable effort to balance philosophy and science; but the sheer size of the resulting text may have deterred some readers — I confess to being somewhat daunted myself. Now he has come back with a slimmer volume The Ego Tunnel which is aimed at a wider public and raises wider issues which Metzinger suggests need public attention.

Metzinger’s theory — the Self-model Theory of Subjectivity or SMT — suggests that subjective experience is really a kind of trick the brain plays on itself. Our brain sets up a model of the world (actually based on fairly limited data) to which it then adds a model of us, ourselves. The coherence of the model and the fact that the processes supporting it are transparent — i.e., invisible to us — yield the vivid impression of a self in direct contact with reality, and that’s where subjectivity arises; although in fact the whole thing is simply an illusion.

Metzinger’s view of qualia is characteristically complex. He has a good argument against the existence of what he calls canonical qualia, qualia conceived as subjective universals. He points out that our ability to discriminate is far greater than our ability to recognise. So, if we are presented with examples of green 64 and green 66, we can readily tell the difference: but if at a later stage we are presented with one of the examples, we have no hope of telling which it is. So there is no single thing that consistently goes along with the experience of green 64.

Concluding that at any rate we need to distinguish between ‘qualia’ available to memory and qualia available to the faculty of recognition, Metzinger goes on to distinguish a series of possible conceptions of qualia, ending with ‘Metzinger qualia’ which are available attentionally but not cognitively. These are slippery customers for obvious reasons, impossible to report and broadly ineffable — but then that’s how qualia are generally assumed to be.

Even as a summary, the foregoing is a bare and radically, probably over- simplified view of the theory, however. Metzinger actually presents ten constraints which need to be satisfied for the occurrence of subjective experience …

via The Ego Tunnel (pt 1) | Machines Like Us.

Of course, once we understand that the basic way the brain is wired is with feedback loops, the most sensible idea (and the most touch with our experience) is if consciousness feeds back into the brain as an input. This “self” input is as important and sometimes more important than input from the outside world.  Yes, it happens after other experience, but we have an illusion that we live in the “now” and that we are in control. These are important illusions and very adaptive. Consciousness is a self correction program, an observer model that believes it is the main actor.

‘It showed that microscopic worm-like structures found in a Martian meteorite that hit the Earth 13,000 years ago are almost certainly fossilised bacteria. The so-called bio-morphs are embedded beneath the surface layers of the rock, suggesting that they were already present when the meteorite arrived, rather than being the result of subsequent contamination by Earthly bacteria.

“This is very strong evidence of life on Mars,” said David Mackay, a senior scientist at the Nasa Johnson Space Centre , who was part of the team of scientists that originally investigated the meteorite when it was discovered in 1984. -Times Online

Are you interested in biology?

The Sanofi-Aventis BioTalent Challenge (SABC) encourages young Canadians to pursue studies and careers in the exciting field of biotechnology.

Apply at:

http://sanofibiotalentchallenge.ca/

Prized for their impressive antlers, red deer have been caught in the hunters’ sights for generations. But a deer’s antlers are much more than decorative. They are lethal weapons that stags crash together when duelling. John Currey, from The University of York, UK, has been intrigued by the mechanical properties of bone for over half a century and has become fascinated by the mechanical properties of antler through a long-standing collaboration with Tomas Landete-Castillejos at the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha.

‘Antlers look as if they are dry,’ says Currey, ‘but no one knew if they really are dry when used in contests’. Curious to find out whether red deer antlers are used wet or dry when duelling, and how this affects the antlers’ mechanical properties, Currey headed south to La Mancha to test the mechanical properties of red deer antlers and publishes the discovery that dry antler is stiff and tough on 27 November 2009 in the Journal of Experimental Biology at http://jeb.biologists.org.

But before the team could begin testing the antler’s strength, they needed to find out how dry the bones were. Collecting freshly cut antlers from the university farm and a local game estate just after stags had shed the antler’s protective velvet, Currey, Landete-Castillejos, José Estevez and their colleagues weighed the antlers each week to find out how much they dried. Amazingly, over the first 2 weeks, the antlers lost a colossal 8% of their weight, compared with 1% weight loss if they were cut at other times of the year. Eventually the weight loss stabilised and the antler’s humidity was in balance with that of the surrounding air. It was clear that the antlers were dry when the stags began duelling.

But how did this water loss affect the bone’s material properties in comparison with those of normal bones, which function internally and are always wet? Would the dry antler make a better weapon than wet bone?

The team prepared 40 mm long blocks of dry antler and wet deer femur and measured the amount of force needed to bend the blocks to find out how flexible the materials were. Even though most bones are relatively brittle and inflexible when dry, the team found that the dry antlers are almost as stiff as wet bone: which is ideal for weapons that have to survive a lengthy pushing contest after the initial clash.

But how ‘tough’ was the antler? How much energy could it absorb in the initial crash? Applying a force to the middle of the blocks of bone and gently increasing it until the bone broke, the team plotted a curve of the bending force against the amount that the bone bent. Calculating the amount of energy that the antler could absorb before shattering, Currey found that the tissue was incredibly tough: 2.4 times tougher than normal wet bone. And when Currey measured the amount of energy that the dry antler could absorb in an impact, he was surprised and pleased to see that it could survive impacts 6 times greater than the impacts that shattered wet femur. The dry antler was tougher than wet bone and ideally suited to survive the stags’ initial clash.

So dry deer antlers are simultaneously stiff, yet tough, making them perfectly suited to their role as a weapon. And the deer seem to have solved a problem that has puzzled engineers for decades. ‘It is very difficult to make anything that is both stiff and tough,’ says Currey, but it seems that duelling deer solved the problem eons ago.

via Tough yet stiff deer antler is materials scientist’s dream.

Prized for their impressive antlers, red deer have been caught in the hunters’ sights for generations. But a deer’s antlers are much more than decorative. They are lethal weapons that stags crash together when duelling. John Currey, from The University of York, UK, has been intrigued by the mechanical properties of bone for over half a century and has become fascinated by the mechanical properties of antler through a long-standing collaboration with Tomas Landete-Castillejos at the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha. ‘Antlers look as if they are dry,’ says Currey, ‘but no one knew if they really are dry when used in contests’. Curious to find out whether red deer antlers are used wet or dry when duelling, and how this affects the antlers’ mechanical properties, Currey headed south to La Mancha to test the mechanical properties of red deer antlers and publishes the discovery that dry antler is stiff and tough on 27 November 2009 in the Journal of Experimental Biology at http://jeb.biologists.org.

But before the team could begin testing the antler’s strength, they needed to find out how dry the bones were. Collecting freshly cut antlers from the university farm and a local game estate just after stags had shed the antler’s protective velvet, Currey, Landete-Castillejos, José Estevez and their colleagues weighed the antlers each week to find out how much they dried. Amazingly, over the first 2 weeks, the antlers lost a colossal 8% of their weight, compared with 1% weight loss if they were cut at other times of the year. Eventually the weight loss stabilised and the antler’s humidity was in balance with that of the surrounding air. It was clear that the antlers were dry when the stags began duelling.

But how did this water loss affect the bone’s material properties in comparison with those of normal bones, which function internally and are always wet? Would the dry antler make a better weapon than wet bone?

The team prepared 40 mm long blocks of dry antler and wet deer femur and measured the amount of force needed to bend the blocks to find out how flexible the materials were. Even though most bones are relatively brittle and inflexible when dry, the team found that the dry antlers are almost as stiff as wet bone: which is ideal for weapons that have to survive a lengthy pushing contest after the initial clash.

But how ‘tough’ was the antler? How much energy could it absorb in the initial crash? Applying a force to the middle of the blocks of bone and gently increasing it until the bone broke, the team plotted a curve of the bending force against the amount that the bone bent. Calculating the amount of energy that the antler could absorb before shattering, Currey found that the tissue was incredibly tough: 2.4 times tougher than normal wet bone. And when Currey measured the amount of energy that the dry antler could absorb in an impact, he was surprised and pleased to see that it could survive impacts 6 times greater than the impacts that shattered wet femur. The dry antler was tougher than wet bone and ideally suited to survive the stags’ initial clash.

So dry deer antlers are simultaneously stiff, yet tough, making them perfectly suited to their role as a weapon. And the deer seem to have solved a problem that has puzzled engineers for decades. ‘It is very difficult to make anything that is both stiff and tough,’ says Currey, but it seems that duelling deer solved the problem eons ago.

via Tough yet stiff deer antler is materials scientist’s dream.

I’ve spent the last few weeks of my spare time creating new bird calendars.  The great thing about this, they really look good.  The frustrating thing about this, it is so hard to choose what goes in and what gets cut.  I always want to include more birds and more shots of the same birds.  The images below are linked directly to the two calendars. So here are the details and rather than retype everything all over again, I’ll quote from my newsletter…

It has been an interesting year. To celebrate, I’ve created two new calendars for 2010. The first one covers some of our local diurnal raptors. (San Francisco Bay Area) The second is a general birding calendar to celebrate some of my other favorite bird species also found in the San Francisco Bay Area. The older calendars are available for sale too, and all show the upcoming days for 2010.

2009 saw the return of a nesting pair of peregrines to downtown San Francisco. This brought more opportunity for photography and some dramatic images. I’ve included three images of the peregrines along with shots of Red-tailed Hawks, American Kestrels, Northern Harriers, and a White-tailed Kite.

Birds of the San Francisco Bay Area Calendar

From the January page:

San Francisco Bay Area birding is some of the richest in the country with more than 120 species found in and around San Francisco. While this calendar shows only thirteen of them, they are some of my favorites. I hope you will enjoy them and that they will inspire you to go out and observe birds where you live.

Birds are facing increasing challenges because of habitat loss, pollution, pesticides, and collisions with wind turbines and building windows. There are many organizations, both national and local, working to address these issues, and they could use your help. Check with your local Audubon chapter to see what you can do to make this a better world for birds and in turn for all of us.

My goal in photographing these magnificent creatures is to bring the joy of flight to others and to showcase the incredible speed and grace that birds exhibit. I hope these images will awaken a greater appreciation of nature and the need for conservation of all that we hold dear on this planet.

If you would like to preview the images at a larger size than those shown at the CafePress website, please visit my home page raptor-gallery.com and follow the links.

(Mail Online) - In a rare battle of beasts these images show how several populations of skilled killer whales around the world have learned how to overcome huge sharks, that most animals give a wide berth. …

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1231454/Killer-whales-Death-karate-chop-deadly-tactic-used-orcas-sharks.html

People suffering from a form of incurable blindness could soon become the first patients in the world to benefit from a new and controversial transplant operation using stem cells derived from spare human embryos left over from IVF treatment. 

 Scientists working for an American biotechnology company yesterday applied for a licence to carry out a clinical trial on patients in the US suffering from a type of macular degeneration, which causes gradual loss of vision. They expect the transplant operations to begin early in the new year. 

The development is highly controversial because many “pro-life” groups are opposed to using human embryos in any kind of medical research but scientists believe that the benefits could revolutionise the treatment of many incurable disorders ranging from Parkinson’s to heart disease.

The company has applied for a licence from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and is confident of its application being granted. 

“We’ve seen absolutely no adverse effects whatsoever in any of the preclinical experiments and our cells are more than 99.9 per cent pure,” said Dr Robert Lanza, the chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) in Worcester, Massachusetts. 

“We certainly expect them [the FDA] to come back with comments and questions but our hope is that we will start sometime early next year. We’re optimistic and certainly confident in our own data. We’ve been in dialogue [with the FDA] and we know what was on their mind and what they wanted us to do,” he said. “We’re hoping, assuming no hitches, to begin early next year, perhaps March.” 

Stem cells derived from human embryos that are only a few days old have the ability to develop into any of the scores of specialised tissues of the body. The hope is that they could be used to repair the damaged organs and tissues of patients with a relatively simple transplant procedure. 

ACT has filed an “investigational new drug” application with the FDA to treat a form of progressive damage to the retina of the eye called Stargardt’s macular degeneration, which destroys the central part of the retina involved in recognising faces and reading words on a page. They also intend to follow this with an application to treat age-related macular degeneration, which affects more than 500,000 people in Britain and is the most common cause of blindness. 

“We hope to file a second application for age-related macular degeneration very soon within the next few months,” said Dr Lanza. “I think we’ve put together a pretty convincing case but the FDA has to be pretty careful. I’m sure they will come back to us in the next 30 days with more questions.” 

The treatment for eye disease uses stem cells to recreate a type of cell in the retina that supports the photoreceptors needed for vision. These cells form the retinal pigment epithelium – which keep the light-sensing cells of the retina alive – which are often the first to die off in macular degeneration, which in turn leads to loss of vision, he said. 

A single cell from a human embryo left over from IVF treatment was used in the creation of the stem cell “line” that Dr Lanza and his colleagues cultivated in the laboratory. By bathing the stem cells in a suite of chemical messengers, they were able to stimulate them to develop into fully mature retinal pigment epithelium cells. 

Tests on animals found that transplants of the human cells into rats with macular degeneration resulted in a “100 per cent improvement” in vision with no side-effects, Dr Lanza said. Transplants into the 12 human volunteers chosen as guinea pigs for the first clinical trial will involve giving them mild immuno-suppressant drugs to prevent tissue rejection. 

“We’re going to take a precautionary approach and use low-dose immuno-suppression after the operation and after six weeks we’ll taper it off. We don’t know whether we will really need it,” Dr Lanza said. 

He said the clinical trial could well be the first in the world because the only other company that had received a licence from the FDA had had to delay the start of its own clinical trial until the end of next year. 

Geron, which received its FDA licence earlier this year, has run into safety problems with experiments on animals involving the growth of cysts. It has had to provide further information to the FDA in order to satisfy nervous regulators that the new technique is as safe as possible. 

Meanwhile, ACT believes it has stolen a march on Geron because its own pre-clinical studies on animals have shown that its embryonic stem cells are extremely pure and safe with no signs of the cysts seen in the animals injected with the embryonic stem cells that Geron was hoping to use in patients suffering from spinal cord injuries. “They’ve been through this with Geron and the company has put out an announcement that they won’t start until the third quarter of next year, so ours may well be the first trial,” Dr Lanza said.

A similar proposal to treat age-related macular degeneration with embryonic stem cells is being developed by scientists in Britain led by Professor Pete Coffey of University College London, but this clinical trial is unlikely to start until early 2011. “It’s such a complex, wholly new process that nobody had done before and it has to be done properly,” he said. 

“It hasn’t been done before in humans and that is affecting the last stages of the plan to get into the clinic so it’s obvious that we don’t want anything to go wrong. But someone has to be the first take that step.” 

Dr Lanza said that extensive work had been done to ensure that the cells derived from embryonic stem cells were of high enough quality to be considered clinical grade. His company has submitted nine volumes of safety data to the FDA to address concerns over purity and the possibility that the stem cells may trigger the formation of cancerous tumours. 

“What we definitely have going for us is that the cells are so well purified, well characterised and there are no adverse effects. So there is nothing here to send up a flag of concern,” Dr Lanza said. “It has been over a decade since human embryonic stem cells were first discovered. The field desperately needs a big clinical success.”

“After years of research and political debate, we’re finally on the verge of showing the potential clinical value of embryonic stem cells. Our research clearly shows that stem cell-derived retinal cells can rescue visual function in animals that otherwise would have gone blind.

 ”We are hopeful that the cells will be similarly efficacious in patients,” Dr Lanza added.

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Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Total Available: $16 Million
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Eligibility: Unrestricted

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The National Science Foundation (NSF) invites investigators at U.S. organizations to submit proposals to conduct research about the Arctic. Arctic research includes field and modeling studies and data analysis in and about the arctic region. The goal of the NSF Division of Arctic Sciences is to gain a better understanding of the Arctic’s physical, biological, geological, chemical, social and cultural processes, and the interactions of ocean, land, atmosphere, biological, and human systems in the Arctic. The Division of Arctic Sciences and other NSF programs support projects that contribute to the development of the next generation of researchers and scientific literacy for all ages through education, outreach, and broadening participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Program representatives from OPP and other non-OPP NSF programs that support arctic research coordinate across NSF, including joint review and funding of arctic proposals and mutual support of special projects with high logistical costs.

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A question posted by Teddy, a science graduate of UC Santa Barbara asked this question:

…Is it known how many calories human thinking takes?  I see in your archives that the brain uses 10% of the body’s energy, and I’ve heard that our brains draw 25% of our blood flow, and that 25% of the heat radiated from our bodies is radiated from our heads, but is this true for all mammals?  For all primates?  How many calories are consumed by the “higher functions” of the brain that are special to humans, and how many by the parts that are found in other mammals?

———————————-

Alex Goddard, Grad student, Neuroscience, Harvard Medical School answers…

Hi Teddy,

That’s a good question! I think the short answer is that it’s less energy than you might expect. I’ve tried to explain why I think so below.

First, I’d say that the basic energy expenditure per unit area of brain is probably the same between different types of animals. A human brain uses more total energy than a rat brain because it’s bigger and more complex. This idea probably applies to heat generation, blood flow and caloric requirement as well.

I saw somewhere that the brain uses 20% of your caloric input for the day. I don’t think that number is absolute, but it seems reasonable. So, assuming you eat 2000 calories per day, your brain uses about 400 calories per day. Then, we need to ask, how much is spent on ‘thinking’ or cognitive abilities? (I’m leaving the idea of consciousness out of this, because it has no definition that has been agreed upon)

To start out, we need to realize that the energy expenditure of the brain at rest is really quite high. This is because maintaining a neuron’s baseline is very metabolically “expensive;” before neurons can transmit information, they have to be properly connected and maintained. A neuron’s ability to use electricity to transfer information comes at the cost of a large amount of energy; it needs to constantly pump different ions into and out of the cell (ions carry the electric charge). Maintaining the long nerves that may extend a meter (such as the ones from your brain to your spinal cord) is also metabolically taxing as new proteins have to be made constantly and shipped down the nerve. All these processes require energy, and we haven’t even sent any information down axons yet! I would contend that the amount of energy spent maintaining the cell is far more than is actually spent on sending an electrical impulse down an axon.

Ok, so cell maintenance requires a lot of energy. One could then ask the question, “What about the cognitive functions? How much energy do they require?” I think the best way to answer this would be to first ask, ‘How much of the brain is devoted to cognitive function?” If we could say that 50% of the brain was devoted to cognitive function, then we could say 50% of the energy is devoted towards maintaining cognitive function.

The answer to that question is a hard one to pin down. Most of the brain is involved in non-cognitive processing. The brain must recreate visual space from a bunch of pixels in your eye. It computes the location of a sound based on when the sound hits your right ear versus your left ear (within 2 degrees, I think). It maintains your balance, triggers fight-or-flight responses, and decides how your fingers must move to type on a keyboard. Lots of non-cognitive processes are going on.

Furthermore, cognitive abilities are distributed all over the brain. (For those not familiar with brain anatomy, take a peek here for reference for the following descriptions: http://normandy.sandhills.cc.nc.us/psy150/outerbr.gif )

For instance, a brain scan (functional MRI) of people doing arithmetic showed activity in frontal lobe, temporal lobe, and occipital lobe (although activation of the occipital lobe, the site of vision processing, may have had to do with the subjects seeing the math problem). Language processing and generation is located mainly in the temporal lobe and frontal lobe. Decision-making and determining the consequences of actions is thought to occur in the frontal lobe. Generally, the frontal lobe is thought to be a hot seat of ‘cognitive ability,’ but it is not a pure ‘cognitive center.’ It is thought to be involved in non-cognitive decision making (i.e. determining unconscious preference and value). So to ask how much of the human brain is solely dedicated to cognitive tasks, I’d have to hazard a very hand-waving guess of 5%. And that’s a pretty liberal guess. And most of the energy used is spent on maintaining the cells and connections in these areas, not the actual cognitive processing itself.

How does that relate to other animals, primate and non-primate? Primates have a very similar level of cognitive power. They do appear to have a simple form of language, and may even be able to read! ( http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/chimps.htm ). They can make complicated decisions. Non-primate animals definitely have cognitive abilities as well, such as decision making, risk assessment, and memory formation, though the degree to which these decisions are ‘conscious’ as in humans is quite debatable. I don’t know if I could put a number on how much more brain space and energy is spent on cognition by humans, because it could be the type and amount of connectivity between cells that is more important than the percentage of cells in the brain.

Lastly, I’ll just briefly mention one interesting tidbit of info. The process of being aware of your surroundings apparently requires a lot of energy, which is not surprising. The basic idea is that as you transmit information, it uses some energy. According to one report, “The high resting brain activity is proposed to include the global interactions constituting the subjective aspects of consciousness. Anesthesia by lowering the total firing rates correlates with the loss of consciousness.” That is to say, low conciousness = lower firing rates = less total energy consumed. fMRI really uses a measure of metabolism to determine firing rates:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=12806834&query_hl=4

I hope that provides some insights. I don’t know if we know enough to calculate an absolute number. If you have more questions, please do submit them!

-Alex G

from What are the energy requirements of thought?

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Can anyone translate that answer for the scientifically-challenged folks like myself?

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Computer rendering of E. coli bacteria. A newly developed E. coli strain is capable of efficiently producing unnatural polymers, through a one-step fermentation process. (Credit: iStockphoto/Sebastian Kaulitzki)

A team of pioneering South Korean scientists have succeeded in producing the polymers used for everyday plastics through bioengineering, rather than through the use of fossil fuel based chemicals. This groundbreaking research, which may now allow for the production of environmentally conscious plastics, is published in two papers in the journal Biotechnology and Bioengineering.

Polymers are molecules found in everyday life in the form of plastics and rubbers. The team, from the KAIST University and the Korean chemical company LG Chem, led by Professor Sang Yup Lee focused their research on polylactic acid (PLA), a bio-based polymer which holds the key to producing plastics through natural and renewable resources.

“The polyesters and other polymers we use everyday are mostly derived from fossil oils made through the refinery or chemical process,” said Lee. “The idea of producing polymers from renewable biomass has attracted much attention due to the increasing concerns of environmental problems and the limited nature of fossil resources. PLA is considered a good alternative to petroleum based plastics as it is both biodegradable and has a low toxicity to humans.”

Until now PLA has been produced in a two-step fermentation and chemical process of polymerization, which is both complex and expensive. Now, through the use of a metabolically engineered strain of E.coli, the team has developed a one-stage process which produces polylactic acid and its copolymers through direct fermentation. This makes the renewable production of PLA and lactate-containing copolymers cheaper and more commercially viable.

“By developing a strategy which combines metabolic engineering and enzyme engineering, we’ve developed an efficient bio-based one-step production process for PLA and its copolymers,” said Lee. “This means that a developed E. coli strain is now capable of efficiently producing unnatural polymers, through a one-step fermentation process,”

This combined approach of systems-level metabolic engineering and enzyme engineering now allows for the production of polymer and polyester based products through direct microbial fermentation of renewable resources.

“Global warming and other environmental problems are urging us to develop sustainable processes based on renewable resources,” concluded Lee. “This new strategy should be generally useful for developing other engineered organisms capable of producing various unnatural polymers by direct fermentation from renewable resources”.

Story Source:

Adapted from materials provided by Wiley-Blackwell, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

1. Taek Ho Yang, Tae Wan Kim, Hye Ok Kang, Sang-Hyun Lee, Eun Jeong Lee, Sung-Chul Lim, Sun Ok Oh, Ae-Jin Song, Si Jae Park, Sang Yup Lee. Biosynthesis of polylactic acid and its copolymers using evolved propionate CoA transferase and PHA synthase. Biotechnology and Bioengineering, 2010; 105 (1): 150 DOI: 10.1002/bit.22547
2. Yu Kyung Jung, Tae Yong Kim, Si Jae Park, Sang Yup Lee. Metabolic engineering of Escherichia coli for the production of polylactic acid and its copolymers. Biotechnology and Bioengineering, 2010; 105 (1): 161 DOI: 10.1002/bit.22548

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091123083702.htm

By Brandon Keim

For decades, paleoartists have told the story of human evolution through sculpture and drawing. Now their tools have evolved, too.

Computers allow a level of detail and control that isn’t possible with other media. Their creations can come closer than ever to bringing our ancestors to life.

“What’s driven my work has always been, ‘I want to see that thing alive. I want to see that world,” said paleoartist Viktor Deak, who provided the reconstructions used in the Becoming Human documentaries, which aired in November on PBS. “Computer graphics is developing to the point where, in movies like “Benjamin Button,” you don’t know what parts are not digital.”

Deak still begins his reconstructions in traditional fashion, sculpting bodies from clay. Like other paleoartists, he doesn’t know what his fossil interpretation will look like when complete, but comes to an understanding of anatomic nuances, of tissue and muscle thickness and how it might have linked to ancient bone, while working with his hands in three dimensions.

Once he’s done, he converts the work to digital format. For a 78-foot-long mural now traveling with Lucy’s Legacy, a touring exhibition featuring the famous 3.2 million year old fossils, he photographed his sculptures and imported them to Photoshop. There he added hundreds of layers of texture and light, tweaking them for maximum combinatorial realism.

That was the old way. For Becoming Human, he worked with ZBrush, a 3-D modeling program that lets him work with the sculpture in even greater detail. “The nuances of the skin, the way light scatters underneath it, they figured all that out,” he said of the program’s naturalism. “There’s no limitation on what you can do, as long as your machine can handle it.” He poses his sculptures in desired position, then renders it with different materials and lighting. The renderings are then sent to Photoshop, layered and tweaked for maximum realism.

“They look realer to me,” said Deak. “For a couple seconds, people might say, ‘What’s that a photo of? Where’d you get that picture? There’s that moment of belief when they’re not looking at it as a painting or sculpture, but as a living thing.”

“He does wonderful stuff,” said Rick Potts, curator of anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Potts described the digital transition as something that many artists have greeted reluctantly if at all, but is necessary.

“I’m excited about it, because it means you’re not just dealing with static appearance,” he said. “One of the great challenges of science communication is taking dead, dusty things we find in the ground, and helping people understand that these were part of a living world. Our ancestors were living and dying, just as we do. Bringing things to life in the digital world can really help.”

The ultimate form of resurrection is as animation, which was done in Becoming Human by mapping Deak’s models onto the motion recordings of suited human actors. But no human can ever move quite like a creature with a different skeleton, and relying on other people to realize his ideas of how ancient hominids moved adds an extra layer of separation.

“Learning animation is my goal right now. That would cross out any ambiguity between the science and the final depiction of it. Once I get the software down, then I can do the whole thing and create the vision of human evolution I have banging around in my brain,” said Deak.

Of course, whatever the tool, the task is still poised at what Potts called “the edge of science and art.” Even for scientists, fossils are heavily interpreted — Lucy, the most complete ancient hominid skeleton, is only 40 percent complete — and Deak immerses himself in the field’s literature, taking in every new find and revision.

“I’m an anthropologist who happens to do art. I don’t write that well and would get bored doing 30-page papers on mandible synthesis,” said Deak. “In my mind I have a tree of skulls that I’m always repositioning and thinking about. As much thinking and analysis as possible goes into each work. I’ve taken it upon myself to be a voice for these fossils.”

Images: 1) A finished Homo ergaster, from Becoming Human. 2) Detail from the mural for Lucy’s Legacy. 3) Early- and late-stage renderings of Homo heidelbergensis. 4) Viktor Deak in his studio.
See Also:

• Nov. 24, 1974: Humanity, Meet Lucy. She’s Your Mom
• Lucy 2.0: Famous Fossil Hominid Goes Digital
• Humanity Has New 4.4 Million-Year-Old Baby Mama
• Vote for Your Favorite Dinosaur Illustration

Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecosystem and planetary tipping points.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/11/viktor-deak-paeoartist/

Get the most from your shut-eye (Image: Susanne Walstrom/Getty)

by Jessica Hamzelou

Sounds played as you sleep can reinforce memories, suggest Ken Paller and his colleagues at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

They asked people to memorise which images and their associated sounds – such as a picture of a cat and a miaow – were associated with a certain area on a computer screen and then to take a nap. They played half the group the sounds in their sleep, and these people were better at remembering the associations than the rest when they woke up.

Paller hopes sounds can be used to improve all kinds of memory and next he’ll be figuring out if we can learn languages while we snooze. But before you nod off, New Scientist helps you get the most out of your shut-eye.

How can you boost your sleep learning capacity?

As a rule, hit the hay after learning something new – late-night TV and Xbox marathons are a no-no.

That is, of course, unless the skill you hope to learn is a computer game: when Sidarta Ribeiro of the Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute of Neuroscience in Natal, Brazil, got people to play shoot-’em-up video game Doom before bed, those who dreamed about the game during their sleep were better players the next day.

Once asleep, playing sound cues (see above) may work for some, but if you like to slumber in silence, try smells instead. A couple of years ago, Björn Rasch and his colleagues at the University of Lübeck in Germany found that people were better at remembering where objects belonged on a computer screen when they were reminded with the scent of a rose, which they had smelled during the learning task, and again during their sleep.

What’s better – one long sleep or lots of short naps?

Take a leaf out of granny’s book – afternoon naps are good for you. Jim Horne, who researches sleep at Loughborough University, UK, thinks that even a 10-minute kip can improve performance, and that this could be lifesaving in the case of overtired drivers and nurses. Such short shut-eye means that you won’t fall into a deep sleep, so you can easily recover without experiencing “sleep inertia” (see below).

In fact, others claim that it is the process of drifting off, rather than the deep sleep itself, that is good for you. Olaf Lahl’s students at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany, performed better in memory tests only 5 minutes after falling asleep.

However, don’t give up on long sleep: rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, which occurs later in sleep, is thought to be important for memory processing.

What’s this about people who don’t sleep enough getting fat?

Our hectic modern lifestyles and shorter visits to the land of nod have been linked by some to expanding waistlines. Sanjay Patel (PDF) and his colleagues at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, put the theory to the test in 2006 and found that short-sleeping women were 15 per cent more likely to become obese than their well-rested counterparts.

Jim Horne, on the other hand, reckons such effects might be overblown. In Patel’s study, the average difference in weight gain between the two groups was a measly 700 grams over 10 years. Besides, Horne says, we’re probably getting about the same amount of sleep as we ever did – around seven and a quarter hours.

Why does lack of sleep make you grumpy and groggy?

Even the best of us has woken up confused and disorientated, usually when we’re awoken during a deep sleep, known as “slow-wave sleep”. David Dinges of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia found that people who were woken up during this deep sleep couldn’t do simple arithmetic, a phenomenon called “sleep inertia”.

But the grumpiness associated with a lack of sleep could be due to a different point in the sleep cycle, REM sleep. This is when we do most of our dreaming, and some think dreams are important for processing the emotions we experience during the day. Matt Walker, a psychologist at the University of Berkeley, California, has even described this process as “overnight therapy”.

How does sleeping improve your memory?

Deszo Nemeth, a psychologist at the University of Szeged in Hungary, suggests that while we sleep, short-term “working memories” are transferred from the hippocampus of the brain to the cortex, where they become more stable, long-term memories.

Meanwhile, Catherine Siengsukon of the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City reviewed the evidence for “offline practice” – practising skills during sleep – earlier this year. She reckons that motor learning – training brain areas that control muscles – during sleep could help rehabilitate young, brain-damaged patients.

When does sleep learning take place?

Different stages in the sleep cycle are important for different types of memory. REM sleep seems to be important for perceptual memory, “like when you’re learning to play darts”, says Paller, while the consolidation of “declarative” memories – facts and events – happens during deep slow-wave sleep.

Article Continues – http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18199-sleep-success-how-to-make-zzzs–memory.html

Improved vision (Image Brian Skerry/NGS/Getty)

by Shanta Barley

It’s one of evolution’s most eccentric creations: a head shaped like a hammer. Now, a study suggests that the hammerhead shark may have evolved its oddly shaped snout to boost the animal’s vision and hunting prowess.

For over a century, scientists have speculated why hammerheads evolved such an odd shape and whether having eyes so far apart would enhance their vision. In 1942 a leading authority on sharks, Gordon Walls, suggested the position of the shark’s eyes prevented it from having binocular vision. But others have argued exactly the opposite, saying the animals must have enhanced eyesight.

Now, hammerhead sharks have had their first eye examination, and it has laid the debate to rest. Sharks with wider heads have better binocular vision – all the better to track fast-moving prey like squid with far more accuracy than sharks with close-set eyes.

The research also shows that hammerheads – among other sharks – have a 360-degree view of the world in the vertical plane, allowing them to simultaneously see prey above and below them.

Sharks at the optometrist

Michelle McComb of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton and colleagues compared the visual fields of three species of hammerhead – the winghead, the bonnethead and the scalloped hammerhead – with those of two other species of shark.

After implanting electrodes into the sharks’ eyes, the researchers moved a beam of light across them until the eyes no longer demonstrated electrical activity. This allowed them to measure each eye’s field of vision, which they summed to calculate each species’ “binocular overlap”.

“To our surprise, we found that the degree of overlap increased as the head of the hammerhead species widened,” says McComb. The shark with the widest head, the winghead, had 48 degrees of binocular overlap; the others ranged from 10 to 32 degrees.

Eyes on the ball

That overlap helps hammerheads to perceive depth as they hunt, says Demian Chapman of the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook University in New York. “I’ve seen hammerheads chasing stingrays in the Bahamas,” he says. “The rays are fast and can turn rapidly, so if the hammerhead is to catch one, it has to be able to keep its eye on the ball.”

Shark biologist Samuel Gruber of the Bimini Biological Field Station in Miami, Florida, says the paper has changed his view of the debate.

Previously, researchers have theorised that the hammerhead’s head may improve its sense of smell, boost its ability to locate prey using electric fields, improve its manoeuvrability or help it to pin down struggling rays so it can bite off their wing-like fins.

Journal reference: The Journal of Experimental Biology, vol 212, p 4010

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18210-why-the-hammerhead-shark-got-its-hammer.html

Anatomy of a bug: This “CT scan” shows the “bodily” positions of molecular motors vital to a Mycoplasma pneumoniae cell. They include ribosomes (yellow) for making proteins, chaperonins for folding them (red), RNA polymerases for “reading” genes and pyruvate dehydrogenase enzymes for producing energy (Image: Science)

by Andy Coghlan

The inner workings of a supposedly simple bacterial cell have turned out to be much more sophisticated than expected.

An in-depth “blueprint” of an apparently minimalist species has revealed details that challenge preconceptions about how genes operate. It also brings closer the day when it may be possible to create artificial life.

Mycoplasma pneumoniae, which causes a form of pneumonia in people, has just 689 genes, compared with 25,000 in humans and 4000 or more in most other bacteria. Now a study of its inner workings has revealed that the bacterium has uncanny flexibility and sophistication, allowing it to react fast to changes in its diet and environment.

“There were a lot of surprises,” says Peer Bork, joint head of the structural and computational biology unit at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany. “Although it’s a very tiny genome, it’s much more complicated than we thought.”

Master controllor

The biggest shock was that the organism gets by with just eight gene “switches”, or transcription factors, compared with more than 50 in other bacteria such as Escherichia coli. Transcription factors are generally thought of as the key components enabling living things to respond to environmental conditions by switching genes on and off.

So how does the cell get by with so few “master controllers”? One possibility is that stretches of “antisense RNA” – basically genes copied back to front – stand in for the transcription factors as gene switches.

An even more intriguing possibility is that chemicals thought to serve as food – such as the sugar-like substance glycerol – are signalling messengers in their own right, helping to fine-tune what the cell does and how it reacts to changes in its environment.

Family surprise

Another unexpected discovery was that bacterial genes grouped together in clumps or families called “operons” don’t work as had been thought. The assumption was that if there are four genes in an operon they always work in unison, but the new analyses show that only one, or perhaps two, operate at any one time.

Even more surprising, the proteins the genes make don’t necessarily always couple with their nearest neighbours – again contrary to previous assumptions. Instead, they often join up with proteins originating from other, distant operons, vastly increasing the bacterium’s flexibility and versatility when faced with a changed environment.

“What we’ve learned is that if you want to understand any cell and the protein complexes it makes, you can’t infer what happens from the order the genes are in,” says Anne-Claude Gavin, also at EMBL, who co-led the project.

The protein analysis also revealed that the bacterium compensates for having so few proteins by employing each one in a multitude of functions. “There’s lots of moonlighting going on, as each protein has lots of jobs to do,” says Bork.

Motor position

The researchers produced a “CT scan” of the bacterium, which shows the positions of some its major molecular “motors”, such as ribosome protein factories (see image, above). The image was created by taking an electron tomograph of the bacterium itself.

This initially revealed no more than indistinct blobs. But by using profiles of electron density of similar molecular machines, taken from the scientific literature, and superimposing them on the tomograph image, the researchers were able to identify which blobs were which motors.

The hope is that when the resolution of such images is eventually increased, many of the smaller motors will also be identified, Bork says.

It may even one day be possible to monitor what is going on in real time, establishing exactly how the genes and proteins work together. If this can be achieved, it could help researchers build artificial organisms.

Journal references: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1176951 (how M. pneumoniae’s 700 genes are coordinated and controlled); DOI: 10.1126/science.1177263 (how the bacterium extracts energy and building materials from food); DOI: 10.1126/science.1176343 (how proteins made by the 689 genes are bolted together to perform functions)

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18206-simple-bacterium-shows-surprising-complexity.html

Modern biotechnology: connecting innovations in microbiology and biochemistry to engineering fundamentals
TP 248.2 M675 2009

Aspects of physical biology: biological water, protein solutions, transport and replication
QH 505 S58 2006

War and nature: the environmental consequences of war in a globalized world
QH 545 W26 B73 2009

By Yunkyu Sohn

Vavlerde et al. (2009) shows that ant nest networks exhibit near optimal wiring, the presence of efficient shortcuts generated by minimal physical efforts, which may be a consequence of natural selection.

Percolation in insect nest networks: Evidence for optimal wiring

The underground Cyberspace Dictatorship

The human biological phenomena of advertising is the most powerful and sustained system of propaganda in human history and its cumulative cultural effects, unless quickly checked, will be responsible for destroying the world as we know it.

It has taught us how to live, what to be afraid of, what to be proud of, how to be beautiful, how to be loved, how to be envied, how to be successful.. Is it any wonder that the American population tends increasingly to speak, think, feel in terms of this jabberwocky? That the stimuli of art, science, religion are progressively expelled to the periphery of American life to become marginal values, cultivated by marginal people on marginal time?”

Kids are among the most sophisticated observers of ads. They can sing the jingles and identify the logos, and they often have strong feelings about products. What they generally don’t understand, however, are the issues that underlie how advertising works. Mass media are used not only to sell goods but also ideas: how we should behave, what rules are important, who we should respect and what we should value.

Read the whole article @ Comfortnetworks.nl

http://gino.comfortnetworks.nl/index.php/2009/11/27/commercial-child-exploitation/