Childhood exposure to lead dust has been linked to lasting physical and behavioral effects, and now lead dust from vehicles using leaded gasoline has been linked to instances of aggravated assault two decades after exposure, says Tulane toxicologist Howard W. Mielke.
Vehicles using leaded gasoline that contaminated cities’ air decades ago have increased aggravated assault in urban areas, researchers say.
The new findings are published in the journal Environment International by Mielke, a research professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the Tulane University School of Medicine, and demographer Sammy Zahran at the Center for Disaster and Risk Analysis at Colorado State University.
The researchers compared the amount of lead released in six cities: Atlanta, Chicago, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, New Orleans and San Diego, during the years 1950-1985. This period saw an increase in airborne lead dust exposure due to the use of leaded gasoline. There were correlating spikes in the rates of aggravated assault approximately two decades later, after the exposed children grew up.
After controlling for other possible causes such as community and household income, education, policing effort and incarceration rates, Mielke and Zahran found that for every one percent increase in tonnages of environmental lead released 22 years earlier, the present rate of aggravated assault was raised by 0.46 percent.
“Children are extremely sensitive to lead dust, and lead exposure has latent neuroanatomical effects that severely impact future societal behavior and welfare,” says Mielke. “Up to 90 per cent of the variation in aggravated assault across the cities is explained by the amount of lead dust released 22 years earlier.” Tons of lead dust were released between 1950 and 1985 in urban areas by vehicles using leaded gasoline, and improper handling of lead-based paint also has contributed to contamination.
Nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA are composed of four bases—A, G, C, and T. Attached to the bases are sugars and phosphates.
First, researchers made XNA building blocks to six different genetic systems by replacing the natural sugar component of DNA with one of six different polymers, synthetic chemical compounds.
The team—led by Vitor Pinheiro of the U.K.’s Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology—then evolved enzymes, called polymerases, that can make XNA from DNA, and others that can change XNA back into DNA.
This copying and translating ability allowed for genetic sequences to be copied and passed down again and again—artificial heredity.
Last, the team determined that HNA, one of the six XNA polymers, could respond to selective pressure in a test tube.
Excerpt of an article written by Christine Dell’Amore, National Geographic News. Continue HERE
It’s almost two years since BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, scientists say they have found deformities among seafood and a great decline in the numbers of marine life. Dahr Jamail reports from New Orleans.
Transplanting bioengineered stem cells into nude mice enabled them to grow hair.Takashi Tsuji/Tokyo University of Science.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the promise of regenerating damaged tissue was so far-fetched that Thomas Hunt Morgan, despairing that his work on earthworms could ever be applied to humans, abandoned the field to study heredity instead. Though he won the Nobel Prize in 1933 for his work on the role of chromosomes in inheritance, if he lived today, the advances in regenerative medicine may have tempted him to reconsider.
Three studies published this week show that introducing new cells into mice can replace diseased cells — whether hair, eye or heart — and help to restore the normal function of those cells. These proof-of-principle studies now have researchers setting their sights on clinical trials to see if the procedures could work in humans.
Excerpt from an article written by Leila Haghighat, Nature. Continue HERE
A basic fact of life is that the size of an animal’s brain depends to some extent on its body size. A long history of studies of vertebrate animals has demonstrated that the relationship between brain and body mass follows a power-law function. Smaller individuals have relatively larger brains for their body sizes. This scaling relationship was popularized as Haller’s Rule by German evolutionary biologist Bernhard Rensch in 1948, in honor of Albrecht von Haller, who first noticed the relationship nearly 250 years ago. Little has been known, however, about relative brain size for invertebrates such as insects, spiders and nematodes, even though they are among Earth’s more diverse and abundant animal groups. But a recent wave of studies of invertebrates confirms that Haller’s Rule applies to them as well, and that it extends to much smaller body sizes than previously thought.
These tiny animals have been able to substantially shift their allometric lines—that is, the relationship between their brain size and their overall body size—from those of vertebrates and other invertebrates. Animals that follow a given allometric line belong to the same grade and changes from one grade to another are known as grade shifts. The result is that different taxonomic groups have different, variant, versions of Haller’s Rule.
Excerpt from a paper by William G. Eberhard, William T. Wcislo, American Scientist. Continue HERE
Since the 1960s a disparate group of scientists and former drug addicts have been advocating a radical treatment for addiction – a hallucinogen called ibogaine, derived from an African plant, that in some cases seems to obliterate withdrawal symptoms from heroin, cocaine and alcohol. So why isn’t it widely used?
No one wants an enemy. Few things could be more stressful and potentially damaging: We dread the nemesis vying for the same job, a rival business trying to steal customers, or the opposing sports team that always sweeps.
A half-century ago, however, a British ornithologist put forth a surprising new idea about enemies in the natural world: Maybe they aren’t always such a bad thing. In a 1954 book chapter, James Fisher suggested that territorial birds might actually gain some advantages from living near threatening rivals. He called it the “dear enemy” phenomenon: Birds that compete with their neighbors would also be bound to them in helpful ways.
Over time, the notion of the dear enemy developed and spread. Naturalists observing birds found that multiple species reserved their fiercest aggression not for next-door rivals, but for strangers. Birds that were enemies in the most obvious sense, neighbors competing directly for territory, seemed to fight less, maintaining a kind of détente with their known rivals. Biologists began to study the effect in other animals, from crabs to beavers. Today, there are dozens of studies that examine what happens when animals keep their enemies close.
Excerpt of and article written by Carolyn Y. Johnson at the Boston Globe. Continue HERE
To the biologist Edward O. Wilson, the Metropolitan Museum of Art encapsulates some of the conflicting impulses natural selection has instilled in humans: the innate drive for expression that spurs some of us to make art, the selfishness that motivates others to earn the riches needed to collect it, and the altruism that compels the donation of collections for the public good — as long as the donors’ names are inscribed on the walls too.
But asked to imagine the museum from the perspective of ants, whose intricate social world he has built a towering reputation by studying, Dr. Wilson painted a scene that was less a lesson in evolution than a chaotic free-for-all.
“To them the crowds would just be a flank-to-flank herd of enormous elephants you have to dodge around,” he said with a boyish giggle from the museum’s teeming steps during a recent visit to New York to promote his 27th book, “The Social Conquest of Earth,” which is being published Monday by Liveright. “I don’t think ants would have any aesthetic or intellectual interest in the museum, though they would certainly find a happy home in Central Park.”
Excerpt of an article by JENNIFER SCHUESSLER at NYT. Continue HERE
Introducing Rolling Words, Snoop Dogg’s smokable songbook. A promotion for Snoop Dogg’s Kingsize Slim Rolling Papers created by San Francisco agency Pereira & O’Dell.
Each page is a rolling paper with Snoop’s greatest songs and lyrics written on them – in non-toxic ink – for your rolling pleasure. The pages are perforated making them easy to detach.
The book is made of hemp-related materials, with the cover, binding, and internal lining all made from hemp seed paper while the spine of the book is a match striking surface.
They say silence is golden – but there’s a room in the U.S that’s so quiet it becomes unbearable after a short time.
The longest that anyone has survived in the ‘anechoic chamber’ at Orfield Laboratories in South Minneapolis is just 45 minutes.
It’s 99.99 per cent sound absorbent and holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s quietest place, but stay there too long and you may start hallucinating.
‘When it’s quiet, ears will adapt. The quieter the room, the more things you hear. You’ll hear your heart beating, sometimes you can hear your lungs, hear your stomach gurgling loudly.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging is growing from showy adolescence into a workhorse of brain imaging.
The blobs appeared 20 years ago. Two teams, one led by Seiji Ogawa at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the other by Kenneth Kwong at Massachusetts General Hospital in Charlestown, slid a handful of volunteers into giant magnets. With their heads held still, the volunteers watched flashing lights or tensed their hands, while the research teams built the data flowing from the machines into grainy images showing parts of the brain illuminated as multicoloured blobs.
The results showed that a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) could use blood as a proxy for measuring the activity of neurons — without the injection of a signal-boosting compound1, 2. It was the first demonstration of fMRI as it is commonly used today, and came just months after the technique debuted — using a contrast agent — in humans3. Sensitive to the distinctive magnetic properties of blood that is rich in oxygen, the method shows oxygenated blood flowing to active brain regions. Unlike scanning techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG), which detects electrical activity at the skull’s surface, fMRI produces measurements from deep inside the brain. It is also non-invasive, which makes it safer and more comfortable than positron emission tomography (PET), in which radioactive compounds are injected and traced as they flow around the body.
Excerpt of an article written by Kerri Smith at NATURE. Continue HERE
The first human egg cells that have been grown entirely in the laboratory from stem cells could be fertilized later this year in a development that will revolutionize fertility treatment and might even lead to a reversal of the menopause in older women.
Scientists are about to request a license from the UK fertility watchdog to fertilize the eggs as part of a series of tests to generate an unlimited supply of human eggs, a breakthrough that could help infertile women to have babies as well as making women as fertile in later life as men.
Producing human eggs from stem cells would also open up the possibility of replenishing the ovaries of older women so that they do not suffer the age-related health problems associated with the menopause, from osteoporosis to heart disease.
Excerpt of an article written by Steve Connor at the Independent. Continue HERE
A new study in the Journal of Adolescence looks at motivations in online accounts of self-harm and gives an insight into the various ways young people describe their actions.
The research aims to examine ‘magical thinking’ in explanations of self-harm but this doesn’t necessarily mean magical thinking in the sense associated with psychosis (i.e. unknown forces and jumping to conclusion) but in terms of how metaphors and symbolism and woven into the young people’s explanations.
Part of the article gives examples of various forms of symbolic ‘magical thinking’. It’s a bit wordy but it illustrates some of the psychological complexity of self-harm.
A gun accident fifteen years ago left Richard Lee Norris without his lips, nose, and with limited movement of his mouth. Now after a marathon 36-hour surgical procedure described as “the most extensive full face transplant completed to date,” a team led by Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez at the University of Maryland has restored Mr. Norris’ quality of life.
Masaki Batoh, former musician of the band Ghost and currently also an acupuncturist, recently released the album called Brain Pulse Music. Here, he experimented with his BPM Machine and used traditional Japanese ritual melodies and instrumentation to form a prayer/requiem for the victims of the Great East Japan Earthquake. Fortunately, I read some of his wise insights thanks to Co.Design
“We survivors were mentally shattered like our dead victims.” He explains to Co.Design
Batoh wanted to articulate that devastation, but the worst experiences can be tough to articulate. Talking can require that you catalog each emotion, and how do you do that when your whole psyche is a mess? How do you share the truth of what you feel, if you have no idea what that truth is?
“Human beings lie, but their brain waves never lie,” writes Batoh. And with that mantra in mind, Batoh moved beyond words. He turned to a modified EEG, what he calls a Brain Pulse Machine, to measure the brain waves of earthquake victims and play them back as music. He then mixed these tracks with his own to create Brain Pulse Music, a memorial album to raise money for Japan’s orphans.
To get Masaki Batoh’s $699.99 Brain Pulse Music Machine go to Drag City.
Hear audio samples HERE
Emotional Cartography is a collection of essays from artists, designers, psychogeographers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists, brought together by Christian Nold, to explore the political, social and cultural implications of visualizing intimate biometric data and emotional experiences using technology.
Essays by Raqs Media Collective, Marcel van de Drift, Dr Stephen Boyd Davis, Rob van
Kranenburg, Sophie Hope and Dr Tom Stafford.
Human beings are diverse and live in diverse ways. Should we accept that we are diverse by nature, having followed separate evolutionary paths? Or should we suppose that we share our biological inheritance, but develop differently according to environment and culture? Over recent years scientific research has reshaped this familiar “nature-nurture” debate, which remains central to our understanding of human nature and morality.
For much of the 20th century social scientists held that human life is a single biological phenomenon, which flows through the channels made by culture, so as to acquire separate and often mutually inaccessible forms. Each society passes on the culture that defines it, much as it passes on its language. And the most important aspects of culture—religion, rites of passage and law—both unify the people who adhere to them and divide those people from everyone else. Such was implied by what John Tooby and Leda Cosmides called the “standard social science model,” made fundamental to anthropology by Franz Boas and to sociology by Émile Durkheim.
More recently evolutionary psychologists have begun to question that approach. Although you can explain the culture of a tribe as an inherited possession, they suggested, this does not explain how culture came to be in the first place. What is it that endows culture with its stability and function? In response to that question the opinion began to grow that culture does not provide the ultimate explanation of any significant human trait, not even the trait of cultural diversity. It is not simply that there are extraordinary constants among cultures: gender roles, incest taboos, festivals, warfare, religious beliefs, moral scruples, aesthetic interests. Culture is also a part of human nature: it is our way of being. We do not live in herds or packs; our hierarchies are not based merely on strength or sexual dominance. We relate to one another through language, morality and law; we sing, dance and worship together, and spend as much time in festivals and storytelling as in seeking our food. Our hierarchies involve offices, responsibilities, gift-giving and ceremonial recognition. Our meals are shared, and food for us is not merely nourishment but an occasion for hospitality, affection and dressing up. All these things are comprehended in the idea of culture—and culture, so understood, is observed in all and only human communities. Why is this?
Excerpt of an essay by Roger Scruton at Prospect. Continue HERE
Most people know Kew Gardens as home of the world’s largest living plant collection but are not aware that it is also the location of an internationally important botanical research and educational institution. Going beyond the gardens as we know them, Lonelyleap produced two films for 2012′s Tropical Extravaganza Festival which showcase the behind the scenes work of Kew’s scientists whilst also exploring two of the festival’s themes, Earth and Air.
The second film in the series looks at the work of the the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership in Surrey, home to 10% of the world’s plant diversity, and how the Seed Conservation Department is helping to save wild plants and habitats for our future.
I am a multi media Canadian artist who is interested in language and communication; how knowledge is transported and transcribed between humans and other species. I am interested in inter species communication. I have chosen to sculpt and draw collaboratively with the honeybees for the past 14 years. My research has included the bee’s use of sound, sight, scent, vibration, and dance. I am studying the bee’s use of the earth’s magnetic fields as well as their use of the pheromones (chemicals) they produce to communicate with one another, with other species and possibly with the foliage they pollinate.
My research has included residencies in The Netherlands: To research the bees and flowers of The Netherlands; The Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Britain: To sculpt in the park under the direction of 2 beekeepers and their feral bee swarms, and at Passages Centre d’art Contemporain, Troyes, France: to visit the ancient bee walls of France, to meet with Dr. Yves Le Conte, scientist in Avignon, France and to work for 3 months in a studio in Troyes, France.
The bee work can take years to complete due to a short summer bee-keeping season of 7-9 weeks a year. I spend the rest of the year researching, traveling, and preparing work for the next bee-keeping season.”
Centered around a display featuring a living beehive, Guest Workers features sculptural and 2-dimensional work based on collaboration between the artist and honeybees. Directed and shot by Millefiore Clarkes, 2011.
Self-healing materials will eventually fix anything from cell phone screens to car fenders, enabling surfaces to heal on their own in the presence of different types of light. But none of the earlier prototypes we’ve seen work quite like this new plastic: It bleeds red at the site of injury. Then it heals itself, inspired by the properties of tree trunks and human skin.
Marek W. Urban from the University of Southern Mississippi presented a paper on his new co-polymer at the American Chemical Society’s national meeting in San Diego Monday. When it scratches or tears, a red splotch forms around the “wound,” marking the site.
Development of self-healing substances is one of the biggest current research areas in materials science, and we’ve seen a variety of approaches in these pages. Some would seed plastic or metal materials with capsules that break open when damage occurs, while others would stimulate plastics to re-grow chemical bonds using heat or light. This one works in a variety of situations — in the presence of sunlight, visible light from a light bulb, in pH changes or in different temperatures.
Urban’s plastic is made from water-based copolymers, which are more environmentally friendly than other polymers. They contain a type of molecular link that serves as a bridge in the polymer chain. When the plastic is scratched, cut or cracked, these bridges break. Urban’s breakthrough was to design bridges that produce a visible color change — in this case, a red blotch. The copolymer would work as a thin coating on top of other layers of plastic or other material, he said.
Unlike other self-healing materials, this plastic’s healing process can work over and over, he added. It could serve a variety of purposes, from things like nail polish to self-healing car fenders to airplanes. It would improve safety by drawing attention to a structural defect, and it could repair minor defects in the presence of intense light.
“Where degradation occurs or [there is] mechanical damage, the color would start to change,” Urban said.
Lessons from stressed-out bacteria could help researchers develop cancer therapies. Credit: Eshel Ben-Jacob, Tel Aviv University
SAN DIEGO, March 27, 2012 — When faced with life-or-death situations, bacteria — and maybe even human cells — use an extremely sophisticated version of “game theory” to consider their options and decide upon the best course of action, scientists reported here today. In a presentation at the 243rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world’s largest scientific society, they said microbes “play” a version of the classic “Prisoner’s Dilemma” game.
José Onuchic, Ph.D., who headed the research team, said these and other new insights into the “chat” sessions that bacteria use to communicate among themselves — information about cell stress, the colony density (quorum-sensing peptides) and the stress status and inclinations of neighboring cells (peptide pheromones) — could have far-reaching medical applications.
“Using this form of cell-to-cell communication, colonies of billions or trillions of bacteria can literally reach a consensus on actions that impact people,” Onuchic explained. “Bacteria that previously existed harmlessly on the on the skin, for instance, may exchange chemical signals and reach a consensus that their numbers are large enough to start an infection. Likewise, bacteria may decide to band together into communities called biofilms that make numerous chronic diseases difficult to treat — urinary tract infections, for instance, cystic fibrosis and endocarditis.”
Excerpt from a press release at ACS. Continue HERE
“Communicating Bacteria” is a new collaboration between Anna Dumitriu, Dr Simon Park and Dr John Paul, which explores new research currently being undertaken in the field of bacterial communication through the development of an art installation that combines bioart, textiles and video projections.
Bacteria have intricate communication capabilities, for example: quorum sensing (voting on issues affecting the colony and signaling their presence to other bacteria); chemotactic signaling (detecting harmful or favorable substances in the environment); and plasmid exchange (e.g. for transfer of antibiotic resistance genes). This is now being investigated as a form of social intelligence as it is realized that these so called ‘simplest’ of life forms can work collectively, obtain information about their environment (and other cells) and use that information in a ‘meaningful’ way. Using signaling chemicals such as Homoserine Lactone, the bacteria pass on messages to nearby cells, which can be either part of their colony or other living cells (including eukaryotic and plant cells).
Dumitriu’s long-term artistic practice is focused around microbiology and collaborative practice – Communicating Bacteria builds strongly on Dumitriu’s earlier collaborative work. Dumitriu will work using this new area of research as a basis for the development of a body of new work that will include textile designs with dyes made from bacteria that change color dependent on the behavior and communication of bacteria, crochet patterns based on bacterial responses, interactive interventions that are modeled according to the behavior and communication across bacteria.
A snail transformed into a living battery has moved the world one step closer to having tiny cyborg spies underfoot.
The pioneering experiment harnessed a snail’s blood sugar to “recharge” an implanted battery — the first time researchers have shown sustainable generation of electricity in a living creature’s body over several months. If the snails’ bodies can create enough electricity to power microelectronics, they could act as living sensors or detectors for the U.S. military and Homeland Security.
“In this [direction] the biofuel cells are expected to operate in small creatures (snails, worms, insects, etc) providing sustainable electrical power for various sensors and wireless transmitters,” said Evgeny Katz, a professor of chemistry at Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y.
PHOTO CREDIT: Adapted with permission from L. Halámková, J. Halámek, V. Bocharova, A. Szczupak, L. Alfonta, E. Katz, Implanted biofuel cell operating in living snail. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2012, in press (DOI: 10.1021/ja211714w) | Copyright 2012 American Chemical Society.
A study of gene expression in chickens, frogs, pufferfish, mice and people has revealed surprising similarities in several key tissues. Researchers have shown that expression in tissues with a limited number of specialized cell types is strongly conserved, even between the mammalian and non-mammalian vertebrates.
Timothy Hughes from the University of Toronto, Canada, worked with a team of researchers to investigate evolutionary alterations in gene regulation in the five different vertebrates. They found that although the specialized DNA sequences that regulate the expression of the genes seem to have changed beyond recognition over the hundreds of millions of years since the clades parted evolutionary company, the actual patterns of gene expression remain closely conserved.
According to Hughes, “There are clearly strong evolutionary constraints on tissue-specific gene expression. Many genes show conserved human/fish expression despite having almost no nonexonic conserved primary sequence.”
The origin of the exquisitely complex vertebrate brain is somewhat mysterious. “In terms of evolution, it basically pops up out of nowhere. You don’t see anything anatomically like it in other animals,” says Ariel Pani, an investigator at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole and a graduate student at the University of Chicago.
But this week in the journal Nature, Pani and colleagues report finding some of the genetic processes that regulate vertebrate brain development in (of all places) the acorn worm, a brainless, burrowing marine invertebrate that they collected from Waquoit Bay in Falmouth, Mass.
The scientists were searching for ancestral evidence of three “signaling centers” in the vertebrate embryo that are major components of an “invisible scaffold that sets up the foundation of how the brain develops,” Pani says. Diagnostic molecular features of these signaling centers are mostly missing in the sea squirts and the lancelets, the invertebrate chordates that are the closest evolutionary relatives of the vertebrates. This had suggested that these signaling centers are key innovations that arose de novo in the vertebrate lineage.
‘Silk’ depicts the reeling of the Golden Orb Weaver a spider unique for the golden hue of the web it weaves. According to folklore the web is so strong that fishermen use it to catch fish in the Indo-pacific isles: The web is thrown into water and unfurls catching prey. Silk is currently the subject of biomedical investigations because of its high tensile strength (stronger than steel of an equivalent diameter) and potential use as a biomaterial for example as scaffolds for tissue formation. The 16mm film moves between shots of the spider’s fly infested lair, its body during the act of extrusion, and a hypnotic rotating prism on which the silk is gathered.
The Nuffield Council on Bioethics is an independent body that examines and reports on ethical issues in biology and medicine. It was established by the Trustees of the Nuffield Foundation in 1991, and since 1994 it has been funded jointly by the Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council.
The Council has achieved an international reputation for advising policy makers and stimulating debate in bioethics.
To launch a Nuffield Council on Bioethics consultation, Professor Tom Baldwin, chair of the inquiry, outlines the ethical issues raised by novel neurotechnologies that intervene in the brain. Dr Alena Buyx, Assistant Director of the Council, goes on to describe neurostimulation and neural stem cell therapy in more detail, and Professor Kevin Warwick, a member of the Working Party, discusses some of his work around brain-computer interfaces.
Terms of reference
The Council’s terms of reference require it:
1. To identify and define ethical questions raised by recent advances in biological and medical research in order to respond to, and to anticipate, public concern;
2. To make arrangements for examining and reporting on such questions with a view to promoting public understanding and discussion; this may lead, where needed, to the formulation of new guidelines by the appropriate regulatory or other body;
3. In the light of the outcome of its work, to publish reports; and to make representations, as the Council may judge appropriate.
The above interactive features a male human brain, removed from his skull shortly after death. In order to preserve the brain’s delicate tissue and structure, it was ‘fixed’ in a solution containing formaldehyde, a process that transformed the brain’s soft-boiled-egg consistency into a more resilient, spongy one. The front of the brain, with the frontal lobes, is sitting on top of the metallic stand, and the back of the brain is propped on top of its own walnut-like cerebellum.
Transplanting bioengineered stem cells into nude mice enabled them to grow hair.Takashi Tsuji/Tokyo University of Science.
Lessons from stressed-out bacteria could help researchers develop cancer therapies. Credit: Eshel Ben-Jacob, Tel Aviv University
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