Lungs Can Taste! Weird Discovery Points to New Asthma Treatments. Your lungs know a bitter sensation when they taste one.
Yes, taste. In a Nature Medicine study, Stephen B. Liggett and company found receptors on the smooth muscle in the lungs that respond to bitterness, similar to the bitter taste buds on the tongue. And, Liggett found, the receptors’ reaction to bitterness is to relax the muscles, and therefore to expand airways. That was totally unexpected, he says, and opens intriguing possibilities for pulmonary treatment—for example, asthmatic symptoms could be treated by exposing these receptors to bitter compounds. Like tastebuds on the tongue, the receptors react to bitterness, but unlike tastebuds they do not send any signals to the brain. The researchers first thought that bitter compounds might trigger a constriction of the airways, to prevent toxins from further infiltrating the lungs.
The team’s discovery doesn’t point to a cure for asthma. Image: iStockphoto. This Device Provides Clean Water for Pennies a Day. Photo: WaterconePassive Solar One Step Water Condensation FTW!
We wrote about the Watercone back in 2004, but considering how much TreeHugger's audience has grown since then, it's likely that only a handful of you were reading the site back then. I think it's time to have a second look at this very clever device that has the potential to help provide clean drinking water for millions of people who are lacking access to clean water (or if they do, maybe the access is intermittent and they could use a plan B). This could save many lives for sure. Read on for more details and a demonstration video. Photo: WaterconeStep #1: Pour salty / brackish Water into pan. Photo: WaterconeStep #2: The evaporated Water condensates in the form of droplets on the inner wall of the cone. Photo: WaterconeStep #3: By unscrewing the cap at the tip of the cone and turning the cone upside down, one can empty the potable Water gathered in the trough directly into a drinking device. UC Berkeley Press Release.
By Yasmin Anwar, Media Relations | 08 December 2009 BERKELEY — Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish.
In a wide range of studies, social scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive. (Photo illustration by Jonathan Payne) In contrast to "every man for himself" interpretations of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychologist and author of "Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life," and his fellow social scientists are building the case that humans are successful as a species precisely because of our nurturing, altruistic and compassionate traits. They call it "survival of the kindest. " Empathy in our genes "The tendency to be more empathetic may be influenced by a single gene,” Rodrigues said.
Cultivating the greater good. Biology That Makes Us Tick: Free Stanford Course by Robert Sapolsky. How did life originate? How did life originate?
Living things (even ancient organisms like bacteria) are enormously complex. However, all this complexity did not leap fully-formed from the primordial soup. Instead life almost certainly originated in a series of small steps, each building upon the complexity that evolved previously: Simple organic molecules were formed. Simple organic molecules, similar to the nucleotide shown below, are the building blocks of life and must have been involved in its origin. Multicellularity evolved.