Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened — as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding — she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.
Monthly Archives: April 2008
Quote
“I have no dress except the one I wear every day. If you are going to be kind enough to give me one, please let it be practical and dark so that I can put it on afterwards to go to the laboratory.””Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”-Marie Curie
Mammals and the KT Event
A very important and truly wonderful paper in Nature described a tour-de-force analysis of the Mammalian Evolutionary Record, and draws the following two important conclusions:
- The diversification of the major groups of mammals occurred millions of years prior to the KT boundary event; and
- The further diversification of these groups into the modern pattern of mammalian diversity occurred millions of years later than the KT boundary event.
How to get a date (repost)
Frank Gehry: From 1990, defending a vision for architecture
Speaking at TED in 1990, the not-yet-legendary architect Frank Gehry takes a whistlestop tour of his work to date, from his own Venice Beach house to the under-construction American Center in Paris. In this 50-minute slideshow (before TED’s 18-minute limit), Gehry explains the site-specific nature of his buildings — context he felt was lost in the discussions of his then-controversial work. In this candid and funny talk, he exposes his own messy creative process (“I take pieces and bits, and look at it, and struggle with it, and cut it away…”) and the way he struggles with problems (“This model on the left is pretty awful. I was ready to commit suicide when this was built … If any of you have ideas on it, please contact me. I don’t know what to do”).
Continue reading Frank Gehry: From 1990, defending a vision for architecture
Quote
“In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA.”-Gregory Bateson
Giardia: Protozoan of never ending wonders
… well, OK, maybe that is a slight exaggeration.You know about giardia. Giardia intestinalis. It causes a nasty gut infection, and you get it by drinking water pretty much anywhere in the US (potentially). It is very hard to get rid of.Giardia adapt to immune system attacks (of their host) in a way that passes that adaptation down to their offspring without genes. It is a Lamarkian process. Giardia have no mitochondria, yet many of the genes known to be in mitochondria in eukaryotes are found in the giardian nucleus. So, ancestral giardia probably had mitochondria, but all those genes got transferred over to the nucleus.The absence of mitochondria and the significant reduction of some other organelles has led people to, probably falsely, believe that giardia is some kind of intermediate between prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Again, this is probably a misinterpretation. Giardia, as a eukaryote which has lost specific organelles (yet still does just fine) would be in a sense “more evolved” than any eukaryote. Including, dear reader, you.And now, there is even a newer twist to the story. Continue reading Giardia: Protozoan of never ending wonders
Dave Eggers: 2008 TED Prize wish: Once Upon a School
Accepting his 2008 TED Prize, author Dave Eggers asks the TED community to personally, creatively engage with local public schools. With spellbinding eagerness, he talks about how his 826 Valencia tutoring center inspired others around the world to open their own volunteer-driven, wildly creative writing labs. But you don’t need to go that far, he reminds us — it’s as simple as asking a teacher “How can I help?” He asks that we share our own volunteering stories at his new website, Once Upon a School. Continue reading Dave Eggers: 2008 TED Prize wish: Once Upon a School
Quote
“All sorts of computer errors are now turning up. You’d be surprised to know the number of doctors who claim they are treating pregnant men. “-Isaac Azimov
The Dynamics of Human Body Weight Change
I don’t have time to really do this paper justice, but I wanted you to know about it. It’s at PLoS, and therefore you don’t have to be special to read it free.
Understanding the dynamics of human body weight change has important consequences for conditions such as obesity, starvation, and wasting syndromes. Changes of body weight are known to result from imbalances between the energy derived from food and the energy expended to maintain life and perform physical work. However, quantifying this relationship has proved difficult, in part because the body is composed of multiple components and weight change results from alterations of body composition (i.e., fat versus lean mass). Here, we show that mathematical modeling can provide a general description of how body weight will change over time by tracking the flux balances of the macronutrients fat, protein, and carbohydrates. For a fixed food intake rate and physical activity level, the body weight and composition will approach steady state. However, the steady state can correspond to a unique body weight or a continuum of body weights that are all consistent with the same food intake and energy expenditure rates. Interestingly, existing experimental data on human body weight dynamics cannot distinguish between these two possibilities. We propose experiments that could resolve this issue and use computer simulations to demonstrate how such experiments could be performed.
Chow CC, Hall KD (2008) The Dynamics of Human Body Weight Change. PLoS Comput Biol 4(3): e1000045. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000045
DNA Replication Process
DNA Transcription
DNA Replication
DNA Structure
Quote
“We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet.”-Margaret MeadQuote