The Scientist, July 14, 2010.
Sandwiched between two floors of dead fish at Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences, Kyle Luckenbill is creating art.
As the Academy’s curatorial assistant resident dead fish paparazzo he photographs and x-rays the institution’s 3,000 species-defining specimens as part of a National Science Foundation grant. “We didn’t really plan an exhibit with the project, but it was one of those things where it was sort of a no-brainer,” Luckenbill says. Read More >
The Scientist, July 13, 2010.
At the heart of a feverish debate over the validity of a recent genome-wide association study (GWAS) of centenarians is the authors’ possible misuse of gene chips in different testing groups, part of an ongoing issue affecting other GWAS research. How this variation might impact the validity of the longevity findings, however, including the 150 SNPs associated with extreme longevity, is unclear.
The initially heralded study, published in Science Express July 2, examined the genomes of about 1,000 centenarians, those rare humans that have reached the age of 100, and compared them to those of controls. However, the authors used two different gene chips to analyze their centenarian population, with one gathering about 10 percent of the data. Read More >
The Scientist (blog), June 30, 2010.
Extreme longevity is associated with a select group of genetic markers, according to a new study of centenarians, people living at least 100 years. Using these markers, researchers can predict a person’s ability to become a centenarian with 77 percent accuracy.
“Exceptional longevity is not this vacuous entity that no one can figure out,” said lead author Thomas Perls, the director of the New England Centenarian Study at Boston Medical Center. “I think we’ve made quite some inroads here in terms of demonstrating a pretty important genetic component to this wonderful trait.”
“This paper is an important breakthrough in the field,” agreed Jan Vijg, a gerontological geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who did not participate in the study. Read More >
The Scientist (blog), June 17, 2010.
In order to progress, should the field of immunology look to other organ systems such as the brain and gut, or should it focus its efforts on all that remains unknown about the immune system itself?
“The major advancements in any field come when branches of science collide,” said Kevin Tracey, an immunologist at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, one of the researchers asked to write their opinion about the future of immunology for the tenth-anniversary issue of Nature Immunology.
Tracey’s interests lie in the intersection of neurophysiology and immunology, which took the spotlight after the discovery that action potentials of the vagus nerve regulate the release of cytokines from the spleen and other organs. “That’s just the beginning. I think there is going to be a lot of nerves and a lot of circuits that control the immune system,” Tracey told The Scientist. Read More >
WIRED Science blog, May 17, 2010.
After ravens see a friend get a beat down, they approach the victim and appear to console it, according to new research.
Orlaith Fraser and her co-author Thomas Bugnyar watched the aftermath of 152 fights over a two year period between 13 hand-reared young adult ravens housed at the Konrad Lorenz Research Station in Austria. What they found was the first evidence for birds consoling one another.
“It’s not a good thing for your partner to be distressed,” Fraser explained. “It’s interesting to see these behaviors in animals other than chimpanzees. It seems to be more ingrained in evolutionary history.” Read More >
WIRED Science blog, May 10th, 2010.
Mice in pain have facial expressions that are very similar to human facial expressions, according to scientists who have developed the “mouse grimace scale.” The pain expressions of mice could help researchers gauge the effectiveness of new drugs.
People have been using similar facial-expression coding systems in babies and other humans who are unable to verbally express their pain. “No one has every looked for facial expression of pain in anything other than humans,” said Jeffery Mogil of McGill University, co-author of the study published on May 9 in Nature Methods. Read More >
WIRED Science blog, April 29th, 2010.
A worm named Schmidtea mediterranea has the unique ability to regenerate not just its body, but also its head and brain. Now, scientists studying the worm have discovered one of the genes that allows it to accomplish this amazing feat.
The gene, called “smed-prep,” regulates the location and structure of the flatworm’s brain during regeneration. When the gene is absent, the worm forms a stump with random junk from other parts of its body, but no brain. When it’s expressed in other areas of the body, heads can be made to sprout from anywhere.
“One of the main goals in the lab was to understand the mechanisms that allowed this worm to regenerate its head, brain and sensory organs,” said molecular biologist Aziz Aboobaker of the University of Nottingham, lead author of the paper published in PLoS GeneticsApril 22. “It’s a big problem because you have to make this all from the old tissue. The cells have to mobilize, migrate to the right place and differentiate.” Read More >
WIRED Science blog, April 22, 2010.
When volcanic eruptions wipe out life at hydrothermal vents, some of the new species that set up camp afterward may come from as far as 200 miles away.
“We don’t understand how they get from one vent to another,” said biological oceanographer Lauren Mullineaux of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. “But because we now see that they can move these long distances, it expands the scale of connectedness between different vents.” Read More >
WIRED Science blog, April 16th, 2010.
Ralph Morse, an ambitious photojournalist for Life magazine, covered a funeral in New Jersey on April 18, 1955. Now, 55 years later, Life.com is finally publishing the pictures he took that day during the funeral and cremation of Albert Einstein.
Einstein died of heart failure at age 76 earlier that morning at Princeton Hospital. The hospital’s pathologist removed his brain for preservation and study, in the hopes that scientists could figure out why he was so smart. Read More >
WIRED Science blog, April 9th, 2010.
BIRDS, BATS AND lizards may play an important role in Earth’s climate by protecting plants from insects that forage on foliage. A new study suggests that preserving these animals could be a low-tech way to fight climate change.
“The presence, abundance and diversity of birds, bats and lizards, the top predators in the insect world, has impacts on the growth of plants,” said ecologist Daniel Gruner of the University of Maryland, co-author of the paper published April 5 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “If you don’t have plants, you don’t have organisms that are recapturing carbon.” Read More >