Health. Lab-grown glands, eyes and brain parts | Science. In the latest of a series of remarkable studies, researchers from the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan report that embryonic stem cells grown under special conditions can spontaneously organize themselves into a partial pituitary gland that is fully functional when transplanted into mice.
Over the past four years, Yoshiki Sasai and his colleagues of RIKEN's Organogenesis and Neurogenesis Group have developed a novel cell culture technique for growing embryonic stem (ES) cells in floating three-dimensional aggregates. In their new study, published recently in Nature, they used it to grow mouse ES cells and then altered the culture conditions to mimic the chemical environment that gives rise to the adenohypophysis, or anterior pituitary. Cells within Rathke's pouch then continue to differentiate further, generating the six different types of hormone-producing cell found in the mature adenohypophysis. Sasai's group is at the forefront of these efforts. References: 1. 2. The Beating Heart Donors | Health & Medicine. The brain-death establishment discounts such stories as “anecdotal,” as if they were taken from the National Enquirer. But these three cases appeared in Anesthesiology, the journal of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, which has 44,000 members.
The Harvard criteria state that the brain-dead patient must exhibit no movement. Van Norman, however, points out that some exhibit spinal automatism, a complex spectrum of movements including flexion of limbs and trunk, stepping motions, grasping motions, and head turning. Dr. Gregory Liptak, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, wrote: “Patients who are brain dead often have unusual spontaneous movements when they are disconnected from their ventilators....
One cannot determine with certainty what organ donors feel, if anything, while being harvested. The reason for denying beating-heart cadavers anesthetic during the removal of their organs is hard to pin down. More dramatic are brain-dead pregnant women. Women Feel Pain More Intensely Than Men. When a woman falls ill, her pain may be more intense than a man's, a new study suggests. Across a number of different diseases, including diabetes, arthritis and certain respiratory infections, women in the study reported feeling more pain than men, the researchers said. The study is one of the largest to examine sex differences in human pain perception. The results are in line with earlier findings, and reveal that sex differences in pain sensitivity may be present in many more diseases than previously thought. Because pain is subjective, the researchers can't know for sure whether women, in fact, experience more pain than men.
A number of factors, including a person's mood and whether they take pain medication, likely influence how much pain they say they're in. Future studies, in both people and animals, should analyze their results to see whether sex differences in pain may be present, Liu said. The study was published online Jan. 12 in the Journal of Pain. Sex differences. Eggs May Be Made Throughout Adulthood. Testosterone link to aggression may be all in the mind. Why Are Men So Violent? Why Are Men So Violent? Jesse J. Prinz It will not have gone unnoticed that men are more violent than women.
Men perpetrate about 90 percent of the world's homicides and start all of the wars. But why? A historical explanation of male violence does not eschew biological factors, but it minimizes them and assumes that men and woman are psychologically similar. This historical story can help to explain why men are more violent than women. The authors claim that men are more xenophobic than women, because they are wired to wage war. The male warrior hypothesis makes many predictions that don't pan out. There are dubious presuppositions as well. Social history explains such facts by proposing that men have taken power by their greater strength, leading to violent competition and the abuse of women.
To reduce male violence, it is not sufficient to reform men, as the defenders of the male warrior hypothesis recommend. An On/Off Switch for Sex and Violence. RECENTLY DEVELOPED powerful, yet also delicate and refined, genetic tools can invasively probe nervous systems of animals, far surpassing the safer but much cruder techniques that psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists use to observe the human brain. Now in a remarkable series of experiments, researchers have located a trigger for aggression in mice—providing us with fresh insights into the workings of our human consciousness. You might object that mice and men are not the same and that studying the murine mind is different from studying the human mind. This fact is obviously true.
Yet both Mus musculus and Homo sapiens are nature’s children, sharing much perceptual, cognitive and affective processing. The same process of relentless evolutionary selection has shaped both species—our last common ancestor was a mere 75 million years ago. The structure of their brains, and of their genomes, reflects this similarity. Fatherhood, Childcare, and Testosterone: Study Authors Discuss the Details | Guest Blog. Introduction Recently we published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reporting a drop in testosterone levels among newly partnered new fathers.
We were gratified to see those findings discussed widely, from the front page of the New York Times to spirited conversations among groups of parents. As the study percolated through the media and across blogs, inevitably some of its nuances, interesting implications, and important limitations were obscured. In addition, news of our results was also used by some to reinforce unfortunate stereotypes about masculinity. Critiques of the interpretation of the study and especially its portrayal in the media have been published (for example, see critiques here and here).
We would like to contribute to the discussion by providing more scientific detail and context for our findings. Brief introduction to the problem What we found in our new study These findings generated a great deal of media and scientific attention. We stand on the shoulders of cultural giants | Gene Expression. In reading The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation in PNAS I couldn’t help but think back to a conversation I had with a few old friends in Evanston in 2003.
They were graduate students in mathematics at Northwestern, and at one point one of them expressed some serious frustration at the fact that so many of the science and business students in his introductory calculus courses simply wanted to “learn” a disparate set of techniques, rather than understand calculus. The reality of course is that the vast majority of people who ever encounter calculus aim to learn it for reasons of utility, not so that they can grok the fundamental theorem of calculus.
With the proliferation of tools such as Mathematica and powerful portable calculators fewer and fewer people are getting their hands dirty with calculus in an analytic sense, and more often see it as simply a “requirement” which they have to pass. In a The cultural niche Robert Boyd, Peter J. 49 Fascinating YouTube Videos to Learn About the Human Body. As any doctor, nurse practitioner or other health care professional knows, the body is an interesting system. In many ways, it’s like a machine, with many complex parts.
There is a lot to learn about the body and how it works, as well as how its different systems interact to create a larger system. Here are 49 interesting YouTube videos that can help you learn about the human body: Brain Your brain directs the rest of the body’s functions. How the Body Works: The Regions of the Brain: An interesting look at the different regions of the brain, and what they are responsible for.Brain Anatomy Function: How brain works? Nervous System The nervous system brings messages from the brain to all over the body.
How the Body Works: The Anatomy of the Central Nervous System: Find out how the nervous system is set up, and how it works.How the Body Works: Anatomy of Nerve: The nervous system is made up of thousands of nerves. Muscles Skeleton Circulatory and Respiratory Systems Other Systems. Frans de Waal on Political Apes, Science Communication, and Building a Cooperative Society | The Primate Diaries. Portrait of de Waal by Nathaniel Gold “It’s the animal in us,” we often hear when we’ve been bad. But why not when we’re good? This is the question that has driven Frans de Waal for the past 30 years. From his pioneering research on alliance formation in Chimpanzee Politics , to reconciliation behavior in Peacemaking Among Primates and Good Natured , to the implications for human life and thought in Primates and Philosophers, de Waal has been seeking to understand the roots of moral behavior in the most political of animals.
Unlike most of de Waal’s books, however, The Age of Empathy offers suggestions about how we can implement some of these moral lessons into our own society. For the past twenty years de Waal has lived and worked in Atlanta, Georgia where he operates the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University. Two Curious Primates / © Frans de Waal, Used by Permission Johnson: Why was that?
De Waal: Ah, Kropotkin. Johnson: Yes. The Time-Bomb Genes. When Angela T. enrolled in the genetic-testing program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering two years ago to find out whether she was predisposed to breast and ovarian cancer, it was in many ways the end of a long, difficult journey. For nearly 30 years, she had wondered not so much if she'd get sick but when. Over and over during this odyssey, she'd been forced to confront the most fundamental questions about who she was and whether some inherited characteristic meant her body was destined to fail her. Now there was a possibility she could get some answers.
She wanted to wake up in the morning, as she imagined most other women did, without worrying about lumps, ominous masses, or suspiciously dense tissue. At 49, she wanted relief from a dizzying cycle of more than two decades of mammograms, sonograms, MRIs, breast exams, and biopsies. Every three months it was off to the gynecologist, the breast surgeon, or both. "Why? " A Gripping Tale - Each Flick of a Finger Takes the Work of Five. Scientists unveil tools for rewriting the code of life. MIT and Harvard researchers have developed technologies that could be used to rewrite the genetic code of a living cell, allowing them to make large-scale edits to the cell’s genome. Such technology could enable scientists to design cells that build proteins not found in nature, or engineer bacteria that are resistant to any type of viral infection.
The technology, described in the July 15 issue of Science, can overwrite specific DNA sequences throughout the genome, similar to the find-and-replace function in word-processing programs. Using this approach, the researchers can make hundreds of targeted edits to the genome of E. coli, apparently without disrupting the cells’ function. “We did get some skepticism from biologists early on,” says Peter Carr, senior research staff at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory (and formerly of the MIT Media Lab), who is one of the paper’s lead authors. DNA consists of long strings of “letters” that code for specific amino acids.
‘Plug and play’ 10 Things Exome Sequencing Can’t Do–but Why It’s Still Powerful | Guest Blog. Sequencing of the exome – the protein-encoding parts of all the genes – is beginning to dominate the genetics journals as well as headlines, thanks to its ability to diagnose the formerly undiagnosable. The 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting honored the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel’s coverage of a 4-year-old whose intestinal disorder was finally diagnosed after sequencing his exome. Once investigators assigned a gene to his symptoms, a bone marrow transplant saved his life. And a just-published study compared the exomes of 12 children with combinations of developmental delay, intellectual disability, and birth defects at the Duke University genetics clinic to reference exomes, revealing 7 mutations, 2 in genes not known to be associated with disease.
In the best-case scenario, mutations revealed by exome sequencing suggest a treatment, as it did for the 4-year-old. But for certain types of genetic disorders, exome sequencing won’t help. The 10 Exceptions 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Epigenetics, DNA: How You Can Change Your Genes, Destiny -- Printout - Back to Article Click to Print Wednesday, Jan. 06, 2010 By John Cloud The remote, snow-swept expanses of northern Sweden are an unlikely place to begin a story about cutting-edge genetic science. The kingdom's northernmost county, Norrbotten, is nearly free of human life; an average of just six people live in each square mile. And yet this tiny population can reveal a lot about how genes work in our everyday lives.
Norrbotten is so isolated that in the 19th century, if the harvest was bad, people starved. Click to Print. The Unselfish Gene. The Idea in Brief Executives, like most other people, have long believed that human beings are interested only in advancing their material interests. However, recent research in evolutionary biology, psychology, sociology, political science, and experimental economics suggests that people behave far less selfishly than most assume. Evolutionary biologists and psychologists have even found neural and, possibly, genetic evidence of a human predisposition to cooperate. These findings suggest that instead of using controls or carrots and sticks to motivate people, companies should use systems that rely on engagement and a sense of common purpose. Several levers can help executives build cooperative systems: encouraging communication, ensuring authentic framing, fostering empathy and solidarity, guaranteeing fairness and morality, using rewards and punishments that appeal to intrinsic motivations, relying on reputation and reciprocity, and ensuring flexibility.
The Case of the Missing Polygamists | The Primate Diaries. The origins of our sexuality is the greatest mystery in human evolution. But could our prime suspect be a case of mistaken identity? "Elementary" by Nathaniel Gold If reproductive success were applied to fiction the two billion copies of Agatha Christie’s novels (only trailing behind Shakespeare and the Bible) would be considered a stunning example of evolutionary fitness. Her work, in such classics as Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, or Witness for the Prosecution represents a significant portion of our collective memory that is being passed on to future generations. Ian Lancashire and Graeme Hirst at the University of Toronto analyzed the vocabulary used throughout Christie’s writing career and determined that the sophistication of her language underwent a significant decline in her final years. Imagine for a moment that everything Agatha Christie had ever written was lost to history except for her last book.
This post originally appeared at Psychology Today. References: How Universal Is The Mind? Are we the teachable species? | The Loom. The Power of Introverts: A Manifesto for Quiet Brilliance. Case Closed? Columbus Introduced Syphilis to Europe. Free to Be Fat - David William Haslam. Why Humans Are Crazy for Crispy - The Chronicle Review.
The Fat Trap. "The Diet Debacle" by Robert H. Lustig. Is Fat Gain a Problem or Solution? Instant Expert: Sleep. Trade Time and Energy So You Can Live Slow, Reproduce Fast | Context and Variation. Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D.: The Dark Side Of Creativity. Vodka Delivers Shot Of Creativity. Twins. Gene Appears Linked With A Person's Daily Rhythms.
Harsh Conditions In Childhood Have Long-term Effects. Family history of psychiatric disorders shapes intellectual interests, study suggests. Do some cultures have their own ways of going mad? Biologist E.O. Wilson on Why Humans, Like Ants, Need a Tribe. Is Your Language Making You Broke and Fat? How Language Can Shape Thinking and Behavior (and How It Can’t) | The Crux. Darwin’s Tongues. Why We Help: The Evolution of Cooperation. Foreign languages: The gift of tongues. Vanishing Languages. Why Some Languages Sound So Fast. The science of taste. Diet Sodas May Confuse Brain's 'calorie Counter' Are Your Eyes Also a Window to Your Brain? | Innovations. Your Color Red Really Could Be My Blue | Color Perception. The unsung sense: How smell rules your life - life - 19 September 2011.
New Blood Type Discovered | Mind the Science Gap. Hallucinogenic Chemical Found in Magic Mushrooms Subdues Brain Activity. The Inspiration Paradox: Your Best Creative Time is Not When You Think. The crayola-fication of the world: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains (part I) | Empirical Zeal. The crayola-fication of the world: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains (part II) | Empirical Zeal. The evolution of death.