Anti-clotting factors in vampire bat saliva may save your life. | C6-H12-O6 While I’m on the subject of things that suck blood, I’d like to take a moment to tell you how vampire bat saliva may save your life one day. Today I happened to see a tweet from the Ohio State University Medical Center’s twitter account that linked to a press release discussing a new plasminogen activator that is currently undergoing clinical trials. The drug, desmoteplase, is modeled after a protein found in vampire bat saliva that prevents clots and platelet aggregation, which keeps the blood flowing while the bat is feeding. Plasminogen activators like desmoteplase are used to break down blood clots that are blocking blood flow to vital organs such as the heart, lungs, or brain. Image credit: Flickr user gandhiji40 To understand why bats have this protein in their saliva and why it may be medically useful, we first need to understand how clots form. After the vessel heals and the clot is no longer needed, a chemical called plasminogen is activated and becomes plasmin. Like this:
Sound of sex could alert internet porn filter - tech - 20 May 2011 It doesn’t take much imagination to guess what a porn video sounds like. It’s more impressive, however, when it’s a computer that’s doing the guessing. Automatic image-analysis systems are already used to catch unwanted pornography before it reaches a computer monitor. But they often struggle to distinguish between indecent imagery and more innocuous pictures with large flesh-coloured regions, such as a person in swimwear or a close-up face. The pair used a signal-processing technique called the Radon transform to create spectrograms of a variety of audio clips, each just half a second long. These characteristics allow software to distinguish smutty audio from other content. The model outperformed other audio-based techniques, correctly identifying 93 per cent of the pornographic content from the test clips. “It’s quite ingenious,” says Richard Harvey, a computer scientist at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, who previously worked on image-based pornography detection.
Ancient People Played Lots Of Games: Scientific American Podcast Many of us have plenty of leisure time to devote to trying out the latest Wii game or even watching others play poker on TV. But this focus on play is nothing new, says a researcher at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg. For her doctoral thesis, Elke Rogersdotter studied a 4,000-year-old city called Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley, in what is now Pakistan. ["Gaming in Mohenjo-daro—an Archaeology of Unities"] It was the largest Bronze Age urban settlement in the region, thriving at the same time as the ancient Egyptian Middle Kingdom. Play is not generally studied for its significance to ancient peoples. And they’re not uniformly scattered. —Cynthia Graber [The above text is an exact transcript of this podcast.]
The Physiology of Foie: Why Foie Gras is Not Unethical [Photographs: Robyn Lee and J. Kenji Lopez-Alt] I haven't always been comfortable with foie gras, though I've spent a good chunk of my life working with it. At first, the discomfort was with the taste. I tried it first as a teenager in the form of a cold terrine that tasted mostly of cat food to me. I learned to appreciate how it spreads like the world's most decadent and flavorful butter when served cold as a torchon. My immediate reaction was a slight gag, followed by revulsion, as I imagined the discomfort of having a tube shoved down my own throat. A Case of Ethics Even if you haven't eaten foie, pretty much everyone is familiar with the abhorrent images of mistreated ducks peddled by PETA and sites like nofoiegras.org, and indeed they are truly disturbing. Foie gras production should be judged not by the worst farms, but by the best I've no doubt that farms like this exist in the world, and it is a terrible, atrocious tragedy. Those on one side would answer yes. On the Farm Gavage
Drink 'til You're Green: Scientific American Podcast Still nursing a New Year's hangover? Well, here's another reason to feel bad. The makers of your drink of choice are contributing to climate change—and I'm not just talking the carbonation in your beer or bubbly. Take wine. On the U.S. east coast, it's not the fermenting or the bottling causing the most excessive emissions of heat-trapping gases, it's the transportation. For those east of a line that zig-zags down from eastern Lake Erie to the Rio Grande in west Texas, drinking French wine or a local product lessens emissions from shipping. If you were guzzling beer, I hope it was out of a can. Don't think the hard stuff is clean either. There is good news though.
Partial solar eclipse and transit of the Space Station from Oman Image of the solar transit of the International Space Station (ISS), taken from the area of Muscat in the Sultanate of Oman on January 4th 2011 at 9:09 UT, during the partial solar eclipse. Takahashi FSQ-106ED refractor on EM-10 mount, Canon 5D mark II. 1/5000s exposure at 100 iso. Transit forecast calculated by www.calsky.com (many thanks to Arnold Barmettler for his help). Transit duration: 0.86s. ISS distance to observer: 510 km. Speed in orbit: 7.8km/s (28000 km/h or 17000 mph). The image shows three planes in space: the Sun at 150 million km, the Moon at about 400000 km and the ISS at 500 km. (click on the image for a larger version) Home page What made Darwin first Naturalist Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” is credited with sparking evolution’s revolution in scientific thought, but many observers had pondered evolution before him. It was understanding the idea’s significance and selling it to the public that made Darwin great, according to the Arnold Arboretum’s new director. William “Ned” Friedman, the Arnold Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology who took over as arboretum director Jan. 1, has studied Darwin’s writings as well as those of his predecessors and contemporaries. The historical sketch grew with each subsequent printing, Friedman told an audience Monday (Jan. 10), until, by the 6th edition, 34 authors were mentioned in it. Friedman’s talk, “A Darwinian Look at Darwin’s Evolutionist Ancestors,” took place at the arboretum’s Hunnewell Building and was the first in a new Director’s Lecture Series. Though others had clearly pondered evolution before Darwin, he wasn’t without originality.
Zeros to heroes: 11 unlikely ideas that changed the world - 08 September 2010 Editorial: Unlikely ideas prove how damaging science cuts will be No matter how elegant or ingenious they may at first seem, most novel scientific ideas turn out to be false. But for a remarkable few, the opposite is the case. Written off when first proposed, they turn out to be not only true but world-changing. Read more: 11 unlikely ideas that changed the world Subscribe to New Scientist and you'll get: New Scientist magazine delivered every week Unlimited access to all New Scientist online content - a benefit only available to subscribers Great savings from the normal price Subscribe now! More From New Scientist One Per Cent (New Scientist) Biggest-ever virus revived from Stone Age permafrost (New Scientist) NASA 'flying saucer' for Mars to land in Hawaii (New Scientist) Alien ocean (New Scientist) More from the web Video: Why the right octane matters for your high-performance vehicle (YouTube) 9 Maps to Change How You See the World (Goodnet) Recommended by
The link between coffee and acute ischemic stroke onset Do you drink coffee on a regular basis? I do. And what does drinking coffee have to do with acute ischemic stroke (caused by disruption of blood supply to part of the brain)? Using a case-crossover design, each subject served as his/her own control. They found that drinking coffee doubles your risk of ischemic stroke onset in the next hour compared to drinking other caffeinated drinks such as tea or cola; which may be due to lower concentrations of caffeine in those drinks. When they looked at the frequency of caffeinated coffee intake in the previous week, they found that only people who were drinking ≤1 cup of coffee per day had increased risk for ischemic stroke in the following hour. The take-home message? Drinking coffee temporarily increases one’s risk of ischemic stroke – especially so for infrequent drinkers (≤1 cup of coffee per day). Mostofsky E, Schlaug G, Mukamal KJ, Rosamond WD, & Mittleman MA (2010).
Absinthe Fact and Fiction Absinthe is a spirit. It's very strong, and very green. But is it something more? I used to think so, until I came across this paper taking a skeptical look at the history and science of the drink, Padosch et al's Absinthism a fictitious 19th century syndrome with present impact Absinthe is prepared by crushing and dissolving the herb wormwood in unflavoured neutral alcohol and then distilling the result; other herbs and spices are added later for taste and colour. It became extremely popular in the late 19th century, especially in France, but it developed a reputation as a dangerous and hallucinogenic drug. Much of the concern over absinthe came from animal experiments. It's now known that wormwood, or at least some varieties of it, contains thujone, which can indeed cause seizures, and death, due to being a GABA antagonist. But that was based on the assumption that all of the thujone in the wormwood ended up in the drink prepared from it. Padosch SA, Lachenmeier DW, & Kröner LU (2006).
The Forgotten History of Muslim Scientists [Slide Show] A millennium ago a physicist under house arrest rewrote the scientific understanding of optics—the study of the behavior and properties of light. In a book that has been compared in its revolutionary effect with Newton's Principia more than 700 years later, a Muslim scientist in Cairo—Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (or as he is known in the West, Alhazen)—proved that light traveled in straight lines via various experiments that employed mirrors and refraction. In a stroke, Alhazen pioneered the modern scientific method (hypothesis rejected or not rejected by experimentation) as well as experimental physics. He also was the first to describe the camera obscura—a box with a hole in it that captures an image for the purpose of drawing it precisely, a precursor to the modern camera—as well as examining optical illusions in-depth and the thought processes behind human visual perception.
Semen allergy suspected in rare post-orgasm illness Was Darwin a Punk? A Q&A with Punker-Paleontologist Greg Graffin Editor's Note: This is an expanded version of the Q&A that will appear in the November 2010 issue of Scientific American. Name: Greg GraffinTitle: Lead singer for the punk rock band Bad Religion; Lecturer in life sciences and paleontology at U.C.L.A. Location: Ithaca, N.Y., and Los Angeles How are evolution and punk rock related? The idea with both is that you challenge authority, you challenge the dogma. In your new book Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science and Bad Religion in a World without God you talk about the "anarchic exuberance of life." Was Darwin a punk? Are there any good songs about science? How can evolution be a guide to life? Why write this book now? That's a goal of mine: to get people who may have the motivation or interest in science to recognize the different facts about their natural world. How are evolution and punk rock related? The thrill of science is the process. You describe evolution as a "waterfall." It's a constantly changing system.
Genetically Modified Cows Produce "Human" Milk - Food Earlier this month, China held an exhibition to showcase major technical achievements during its 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-2010). Among the wonders on display were photos of a herd of 200 cows that have been genetically modified to produce "human" milk. Precise details of the bioengineering employed to adjust the composition of the milk these 200 cows produce are not available, nor is it clear exactly how closely the GM cow milk will resemble its human analog. According to the announcement in the state-run news outlet, China Daily, Li Ning, director of the State Key Laboratories for AgroBiotechnology at China Agricultural University, confirmed that the genetically modified herd's milk "contains the characteristics of human milk." Li added that the cow-human milk "tastes stronger than normal milk" and explained that: In ancient China, only the emperor and the empress could drink human milk throughout their lives, which was believed to be the height of opulence.