I tried to paint it orange

laughingsquid:

Interactive Cow Sculpture Demonstrates Digestive System, Rube Goldberg-Style

(Source: novajiang.com, via shiisa)

Soft Cuddy Critters by Brigette Zacharczenko

Screw teddy bears and big plush hearts, Brigette aka WeirdBugLady makes plush huggable water bears, flatworms, and other things that might either eat you or go inside you and then start eating you. Her shop is currently closed until June 1st, but check her etsy page below after that date to get your own soft cephalopod.

Artist: DeviantArt / etsy / Flickr

(Source: ianbrooks, via shiisa)

jtotheizzoe:

ES from SCNT: Another Human Stem Cell Milestone

Human embryonic stem cells have been created using a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) for the first time. Interestingly, SCNT might be the oldest genetic reprogramming technology in our biological arsenal, but its use in creating human ES cells has proven elusive.

We’ll get to the news in a moment, but first some history. In 1958, John Gurdon made a frog from a tadpole.

“Congratulations, John, that’s how frogs are usually made. Big whoop.”

Except that he did it by inserting the nucleus from a tadpole cell into a frog egg that had its own nucleus removed. It should have been immediately clear to everyone how cool this was, but it took 54 years for him to get the Nobel Prize, which he shared in 2012 with some other stem cell reprogramming pioneers.

Why did that work? It makes perfect sense when you think about the job of an egg. Compared to sperm cells, eggs are huge. They are Death Stars and sperm are X-wings, each looking for an exhaust port into which they can shove their half of the genetic material. The egg is stuffed full of the proteins, mRNAs and other biological machinery that it will need to hit the ground running and begin the process of development. In other words the sperm just brings genes to the party (there’s a joke in there somewhere). The egg is the pilot, engineer and tech support. (For the genetics fans out there, this is also why maternal effects exist)

In a sense, the egg is a big bag of stuff that will define what the embryo is, at least for the first several cell divisions. Somewhere in all that eggy cytoplasm is a set of factors that are primed and ready to lead the way to embryoville.

Wait … where were we again? Oh yeah: Human stem cells. 

So while SCNT technology has been around for a while (and has been used to create some very famous sheep), it never worked in humans (despite a faked claim in 2005). The process of removing and replacing the nucleus of donated human eggs was too disruptive. Until the new report in Cell last week. 

Using donated eggs (obtained by consenting women from certfied IVF clinics) robbed of their own nucleus, a whole skin cell was injected and given an electric shock to stimulate cell division. That that even works is amazing. But the harvested stem cells acted like normal ES cells, and appear to be just as useful. They can be used to create patient-matched cells to study specific diseases in the petri dish, or engineered into neurons and other tissues to implant into a donor’s own body. All without destroying embryos.

Of course, we can already make near-embryonic stem cells by directly reprogramming skin cells with a simple genetic cocktail. So does it make sense to seek out egg donations for a technology like this? The ethics of making an economy out of egg donation are murky. And of course, there’s the worry that instead of just being used for making stem cells, it could be used to clone an entire human. That’s completely illegal, but it’s worth considering, at least.

It’s a new step forward in our ability to understand and manipulate human biology, and the advancement of knowledge like this is always worthy of excitement. Look at what power we hold! But we are men and women, not gods … and that’s what makes this all the more remarkable.

jtotheizzoe:

Yes, unfortunately the Velociraptor mongoliensis is more like a very aggressive roadrunner than a man-eating murder machine. But those aren’t the ‘raptors from the movies.

The “velociraptors” of Jurassic Park fame are actually Deinonychus, a (slightly) taller, equally roadrunnerish combination of tail and sickle-shaped toe claw. D-nikes (I made that name up) were not huge, but that claw could easily split you open like a bag of spaghetti.

There’s no real confirmation that they were “clever girls” or hunted in packs, and the insistence of JP’s directors on not adding feathers to these almost-certainly feathered death-chickens is kind of like a claw-toed slap in the face to paleontology.

Just like the great T. rex (which we talked about last week), our image of these dinos changes with new science, and will continue to change. Our fiction needs to change with them.

Edit: Several people have noted that Utahraptor is a close match in size to the movie ‘raptors (a death-ostrich, if you will), but that’s a lucky coincidence since it wasn’t discovered until after Jurassic Park was released.

(Dino images via Colin Douglas Howell on Wikipedia)

wnycradiolab:

You know those little things that keep bread bags closed?  Well, the internet would like to tell you about them.  If you’re not doing anything too important right now, I think you should visit HORG (that’s the Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group) and explore a beautiful, obsessive, hilarious taxonomy of occlupanids.

(ht Metafilter)

(via 8823dsn)

(via scienceisbeauty)

(via jtotheizzoe)

we-are-star-stuff:

1. No Breakfast: People who do not take breakfast are going to have a lower blood sugar level. This leads to an insufficient supply of nutrients to the brain causing brain degeneration.
2. Overeating: It causes hardening of the brain arteries, leading to a decrease in mental power.
3. Smoking: It causes multiple brain shrinkage and may lead to Alzheimer disease.
4. High Sugar consumption: Too much sugar will interrupt the absorption of proteins and nutrients causing malnutrition and may interfere with brain development.
5. Air Pollution: The brain is the largest oxygen consumer in our body. Inhaling polluted air decreases the supply of oxygen to the brain, bringing about a decrease in brain efficiency.
6. Sleep Deprivation: Sleep allows our brain to rest… Long term deprivation from sleep will accelerate the death of brain cells…
7. Head covered while sleeping: Sleeping with the head covered increases the concentration of carbon dioxide and decrease concentration of oxygen that may lead to brain damaging effects.
8. Working your brain during illness: Working hard or studying with sickness may lead to a decrease in effectiveness of the brain as well as damage the brain.
9. Lacking in stimulating thoughts: Thinking is the best way to train our brain, lacking in brain stimulation thoughts may cause brain shrinkage.
10. Talking Rarely: Intellectual conversations will promote the efficiency of the brain.

(Source: myamazingearth.com, via sagansense)

Next week, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine plans to announce a big change: It will no longer consider the freezing of women’s eggs to treat infertility as “experimental.”

(Source: ucsdhealthsciences, via sagansense)

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io9updates:

By Annalee Newitz

You know how when you jump into a parallel timeline, or you watch the Super Mario Bros. movie, sometimes dinosaurs have evolved into intelligent creatures? Usually they look like scaly humans — you basic reptoid model of creature. And that’s all wrong, according to paleontologist Darren Naish, who points out in an eloquent essay on his blog Tetrapod Zoology that an intelligent dinosaur would have evolved a body shape and size that suited its evolutionary history. So what would that look like? Now, at last, we have an answer. Meet Avisapiens saurotheos, the first scientifically accurate dinosauroid, created by artist Cevdet Kosemen. 

Writes Naish on Tetrapod Zoology:

There really isn’t any reason to think that big-brained dinosaurs would have evolved in the first place (recall that even ‘big-brained’ Troodon was, at best, on par with ostriches and opossums). Even if they had, there is also no reason to think that they would have ended up looking like scaly people… or feathery people, given that we now know that troodontids were feathered … The reason that we humans have the body shape that we do is not – I think – because it’s the ‘best’ body shape for a smart, big-brained biped to have, it is instead the result of our specific lineage’s evolutionary history. Given that, so far as we know, the humanoid body shape has evolved just once, we simply have no way of knowing whether it’s a particularly ‘good’ morphology or not. Furthermore, the humanoid body shape is not a prerequisite for the evolution of big brains given that brains proportionally as big as, or bigger than, those of hominids are found in some birds and fish (that’s right: humans do NOT have the proportionally biggest brains).

With this in mind, my feeling on dinosauroids and intelligent theropods and so on is that – if they were to evolve – they wouldn’t look like scaly, or feathery, people, but would instead be far more normal from the theropod point of view. A horizontal body posture, not a vertical one. Digitigrade feet, not plantigrade ones. A long tail, not a reduced one … 

I love his point about how we always assume that the human form is the best for intelligent life. We are so biped-centric, people! Read the whole awesome essay at TetZoo!

(via shiisa)

(via scienceisbeauty)

Heart of Glass: The Art of Medical Models

Gary Farlow can make art out of arteries. He and his team of 10 at Farlow’s Scientific Glassblowing are able to transform the body’s vasculature—and nearly all of its other parts—into an ornate borosilicate glass sculpture, from the heart’s ventricles to the brain’s circle of Willis. “We do almost every part of the body,” Farlow says. “It can take a pretty artistic mind to make some of these things.” With the help of cardiologists, the team creates custom see-through systems for science and medical training. Their anatomically correct models can be designed to simulate blood flow, teach placement of catheters and angioplasty devices, or simply test or demo new surgical gizmos. Individual arteries, veins, and capillaries are shaped and fused together, one at a time. Ground-glass joints are added at the exposed ends so a head, say, can be connected to the carotid arteries should customers want to expand their model. A full-body setup could cost $25,000, so don’t get any bright ideas about using one as a brandy decanter.

(via discoverynews)

“Ideally, one would like to access the positive effects of nicotine on the hippocampus’s ability to process information, but without creating the strong nicotine dependence that keep smokers addicted to inhaling dangerous tobacco smoke,” says Klas Kullander.

(Source: sagansense)

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Your Brain on Marijuana

(Source: thescienceofreality, via sagansense)

projectilevomitingrainbows:

Introducing my favourite protein: Kinesin! It’s so cute and I really want it as a plushie.

Kinesin is the little orange-y thing that looks like two big feet, walking over a microtubule. The big blue ball it carries is a vesicle full of large molecules that were produced in the center of the cell. Kinesin is a motor protein that carries this vesicle to where the molecules are needed in the cell, e.g. at the membrane. Kinesin’s partner in crime is Dynein that walks the microtubules towards the center of the cell. Especially Kinesin is thought to play an important role in mitosis, meiosis, axonal transport and more.

This gif was made from the brilliant animation made by BioVisions for Harvard University. ‘The Inner Life of the Cell’ is amazing and I think everybody should have seen it at least once in their life to get a better idea how much of a miracle life really is.

(via sagansense)