Bearing Sons Can Alter Your Mind. Giving a whole new meaning to "pregnancy brain," a new study shows that male DNA—likely left over from pregnancy with a male fetus—can persist in a woman's brain throughout her life. Although the biological impact of this foreign DNA is unclear, the study also found that women with more male DNA in their brains were less likely to have suffered from Alzheimer's disease—hinting that the male DNA could help protect the mothers from the disease, the researchers say. During mammalian pregnancy, the mother and fetus exchange DNA and cells. Previous work has shown that fetal cells can linger in the mother's blood and bone for decades, a condition researchers call fetal microchimerism. The lingering of the fetal DNA, research suggests, may be a mixed blessing for a mom: The cells may benefit the mother's health—by promoting tissue repair and improving the immune system—but may also cause adverse effects, such as autoimmune reactions.
One question is how leftover fetal cells affect the brain. It's Okay To Be Smart. Calculation of molecular properties.
Novel Science. Hydrolysis of ATP. How does the hydrolysis of ATP release so much energy? It just doesn't make sense, does it? Breaking bonds requires energy, and yet by breaking the bond of ATP, you provide energy for other reactions to take place! How does that work? Essentially the answer can either be simple or complicated. If you want the simple version, it is this - when ATP provides energy, it's not simply breaking a bond, the bond is hydrolysed. A water molecule has to come in to break this bond. If you're happy with that, you're best off leaving it there because the following gets quite complicated, and it needs to go all the way back to thermodynamics and ΔG. The image on the left shows the enthalpy of formation for certain chemicals. Lets imagine that instead of just breaking a couple of bonds, we break every single bond in the whole chemical, and then we make the products of the reaction up from scratch.
Of course, that's not too complicated. At first glance, the whole thing doesn't seem to make sense. On Math. Reading Materials by Eugene Wigner "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences," in Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 13, No. I (February 1960). New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Copyright © 1960 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beautya beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.
The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. THERE IS A story about two friends, who were classmates in high school, talking about their jobs. Naturally, we are inclined to smile about the simplicity of the classmate's approach. Let me end on a more cheerful note. Merci W. Space. Drosophila Game. SpongeBob’s cousins are masters of glass - Technology & science - Science - Mysteries of the Universe. WASHINGTON — For the strongest glass you can imagine, look for sponges at the bottom of the ocean. If you find cartoon superstar SpongeBob Square Pants, keep looking; he’s a bath sponge with a soft skeleton and no glass in his pants.
Some of Bob’s distant sponge relatives, however, build glass cages that have biologists and materials scientists oohing, ahhing and taking notes for future bio-inspired engineering projects and materials. These glass cages have at least seven levels of structural organization, many of which follow basic principles of mechanical engineering, according to new research in Friday's issue of the journal Science, published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society. The “glass sponges” use many of the textbook principles of mechanical engineering in their efforts to transform brittle glass into a strong building material. Why they're so tough Aizenberg described the toughness of some of these glass fibers. “It puzzles me.