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POPSDiscovery of natural odors could help develop mosquito repellents "CO2 emitted in human breath is the main attractant for the Culex mosquito to find people, aiding the transmission of these deadly diseases," Ray said. "In our experiments we identified hexanol, and a related odor, butanal, as strong inhibitors of CO2-sensitive neurons in Culex mosquitoes. These compounds can now be used to guide research in developing novel repellents and masking agents that are economical and environmentally safe methods to block mosquitoes' ability to detect CO2 in our breath, thereby dramatically reducing mosquito-human contact." Woah, this is just great! This should be a great reason to celebrate, once thei're done with the repellent. I think there isn't one person in the planet who hasn't got mad with mosquitos at one time or another. Great news, just great.
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POPSTests begin on drugs that may slow aging With theorists’ and their gloomy predictions cast in the shade, at least for the time being, experimental biologists are pushing confidently into the tangle of linkages that evolution has woven among food intake, fertility and life span. “My rule of thumb is to ignore the evolutionary biologists — they’re constantly telling you what you can’t think,” Gary Ruvkun of the Massachusetts General Hospital remarked this June after making an unusual discovery about longevity. An important difference among experts on aging is whether there is an intrinsic rate of aging. Supposing there were cures for all diseases, what would one die of, if one died at all? <<
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POPSWord Play Click the feed if you're a glutton for punishment. It's fun.
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POPSSleep Clears Way for New Learning This research was done on fruit flies. "Shaw says studying fruit flies in an effort to understand the human sleep-learning connection is less of a leap than one might think" "Mednick explains that a typical sleep cycle involves 10 to 20 minutes of drowsiness and very light sleep, followed by an hour or so of very deep sleep, followed by REM period, when dreaming occurs. Over the course of a night, the cycle repeats, with the length of deep sleep decreasing and REM sleep increasing. A lot of people are walking around sleep deprived, and the 20-minute nap can really help to shake off that middle-of-the afternoon exhaustion,” she says. “But it appears that longer sleep is needed for establishing the connections involved in creative or complex learning.”
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POPSReverse evolution in real-time These findings provide further insights into the basic understanding of how evolution and diversity are generated and maintained. On the one hand, it provides evidence for evolution happening through changes in the distribution of alleles in a population (so-called standing genetic variation), from generation to generation, rather than the appearance of mutations, from one generation to the next. On the other hand, as Henrique notes, 'It has implications for the definition of biodiversity: some of the 'reversed' flies may be phenotypically identical to the ancestral flies, but they are genetically different. How then do we define biodiversity?' interesting experiments.
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POPSNew, improved bartenders can be quite old-fashioned: 8 bartending philosophies They give a couple of shouts-out to the Bay Area: Daniel Hyatt at the Alembic Bar in San Francisco…The movement is at its fullest flower on the West Coast, with its 12-month growing season… At Cyrus in Healdsburg, Calif., Scott Beattie’s Meyer Beautiful incorporates Charbay Meyer lemon vodka.… Martin Cate’s Forbidden Island in Alameda, Calif., offers a Don the Beachcomber formula called the Nui Nui, with fresh citrus, pimento liqueur, cinnamon and vanilla syrups, and aged Barbados rum. I live less than four miles from Forbidden Island – less than three, as the crow flies (or goose swims). How is it that I've never tried a Nui Nui? It sounds tasty!
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POPSPalin and the fruit fly or just plain ignorance
One might have thought that Sarah Palin would take a more active interest in one aspect of scientific research. Palin's youngest son has Down's syndrome, a genetic disorder caused by the presence of an extra chromosome 21. Although a geneticist by training, I am certainly no expert on the pathogenesis of this condition, nor the significance of Drosophila research into Down's syndrome. So, I typed "drosophila trisomy 21" into PubMed, the scholarly biomedical equivalent of Google. There were 109 results, the most recent published just the day before Palin's gaffe. The concluding sentence of that study — about the genetic cues that steer nerve fibres around during the growth of the fruit fly — suggests that the paper will "have implications for the pathogenesis of Down's syndrome". These two are drops in the ocean of fruit fly research that have clinical relevance. Down's syndrome, Alzheimer's disease, autism, diabetes, ageing research, cancers of all types
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POPSHitchens on Palin and Science No comment needed. Hitchins says it all at the source. The poor woman is going to wake up after this and find her world shattered. No True Alaskan Man is going to put up with comments that his woman doesn't listen to him. Mark my words.
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POPSPalin in Monty Python Audition
Yes, scientists work on fruit flies. Some of the most powerful tools in genetics and molecular biology are available in fruit flies, and these are animals that are particularly amenable to experimentation. Molecular genetics has revealed that humans share key molecules, the basic developmental toolkit, with all other animals, thanks to our shared evolutionary heritage (something else the wackaloon from Wasilla denies), and that we can use these other organisms to probe the fundamental mechanisms that underlie core processes in the formation of the nervous system — precisely the phenomena Palin claims are so important. This is where the Republican party has ended up: supporting an ignorant buffoon who believes in the End Times and speaking in tongues while deriding some of the best and most successful strategies for scientific research. In this next election, we've got to choose between the 21st century rationalism and Dark Age inanity. It ought to be an easy choice.
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POPSPZ Lambastss Palin Palin (or her speech writer) trying to pander to the "low information voter" unfortunately uses a really bad example to make their point. And Parrot Palin evidently doesn't know enough about science to comprehend how ignorant she sounds. But I bet it plays well for the target audience it's aimed at. We really need to catch up with the times.
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POPSMemo To Palin: Fruit Fly Research Led To Advances In Autism Palin did not specify what fruit fly research earmark she was referring to (presumably a grant for olive fruit fly research), but she is apparently unaware that scientific research with fruit flies has led to valuable discoveries that have boosted autism research, as a study at the University of North Carolina demonstrated last year: cientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine have shown that a protein called neurexin is required for..nerve cell connections to form and function correctly. The discovery, made in Drosophila fruit flies may lead to advances in understanding autism spectrum disorders, as recently, human neurexins have been identified as a genetic risk factor for autism. The study of fruit flies has also been used for other autism research and “revolutionize ” the study of birth defects.
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