Why We Need GMOs to Survive Climate Change

Today is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, so let’s write women back into science history. Check out the gallery here.

4 new elements added to the periodic table

The seventh row of the Periodic Table of Elements is now complete, rendering all textbooks out of date. The discovered elements don’t have permanent names yet, but their atomic numbers are 113, 115, 117 and 118.

Livermore Lab scientists and international collaborators have officially discovered three of the four new elements: 115, 117 and 118. The illustration above is of 117, tentatively named ununseptium or Uus.

The new elements’ existence was confirmed by further experiments that reproduced them — however briefly. Element 113, for instance, exists for less than a thousandth of a second.

Learn more about the new elements

A required read from Michael Oman-Reagan.

This is all true. This all happened in Canada, and its very likely it will happen in the USA under Trump and be worse than Harper’s crackdown on Science ever was.

Links cited in this twitter essay:

The Big Chill: “Scientists Can’t Do the Job They Were Hired to Do”

More than 1000 Jobs Lost, Climate Program Hit Hard in Coming Environment Canada Cuts

Harper Government Trashes Another Federal Science Library

Federal scientists closely monitored during polar conference

Science Silenced: US Scientist Caught in Canadian Muzzle Climate-change scientists feel ‘muzzled’ by Ottawa: Documents

The Canadian War on Science: A long, unexaggerated, devastating chronological indictment

http://ourrighttoknow.ca/

http://write2know.ca/

https://evidencefordemocracy.ca

Liver Circulation - Flashcard

The liver is supplied with blood by the hepatic artery and the hepatic portal vein

branches of the hepatic artery and the hepatic portal vein distribute blood to the periphery of the liver lobules.

Blood passes along sinusoids, which are lined by hepatocytes, which perform numerous metabolic and synthetic functions. 

The processed blood passes into branches of the hepatic vein in the centre of each lobule, and eventually drains into the hepatic vein. 

The biliary system is independent of the vascular system and bile moves in the opposite direction to the blood. 

Initially it is collected in bile ductules which are surrounded by collagenous tissue, which forms part of the collagenous trabecular septum. 

The bile is collected by increasingly large trabecular ducts, which fuse to form intrahepatic ducts which finally drain into the main hepatic ducts.

Building blocks of memories seen in brains for the first time

Observations of hundreds of neurons in mice suggest that we may divide our memories of where we’ve been into small chunks of experience

At last, we’ve seen what might be the primary building blocks of memories lighting up in the brains of mice.

We have cells in our brains – and so do rodents – that keep track of our location and the distances we’ve travelled. These neurons are also known to fire in sequence when a rat is resting, as if the animal is mentally retracing its path – a process that probably helps memories form, says Rosa Cossart at the Institut de Neurobiologie de la Méditerranée in Marseille, France.

But without a way of mapping the activity of a large number of these individual neurons, the pattern that these replaying neurons form in the brain has been unclear. Researchers have suspected for decades that the cells might fire together in small groups, but nobody could really look at them, says Cossart.

To get a look, Cossart and her team added a fluorescent protein to the neurons of four mice. This protein fluoresces the most when calcium ions flood into a cell – a sign that a neuron is actively firing. The team used this fluorescence to map neuron activity much more widely than previous techniques, using implanted electrodes, have been able to do.

Observing the activity of more than 1000 neurons per mouse, the team watched what happened when mice walked on a treadmill or stood still.

As expected, when the mice were running, the neurons that trace how far the animal has travelled fired in a sequential pattern, keeping track.

These same cells also lit up while the mice were resting, but in a strange pattern. As they reflected on their memories, the neurons fired in the same sequence as they had when the animals were running, but much faster. And rather than firing in turn individually, they fired together in sequential blocks that corresponded to particular fragments of a mouse’s run.

“We’ve been able to image the individual building-blocks of memory,” Cossart says, each one reflecting a chunk of the original episode that the mouse experienced.

Continue Reading.

After the heart is “cleansed of blood and all cells”, only connective tissues remain. This is ideal for doing heart transplants because the recipient’s immune system is less likely to reject the ghost heart if it has no trances of the donor’s body. [Image via http://bit.ly/2izEnse]

Scientists show how drug binds with ‘hidden pocket’ on flu virus

A new study led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) is the first to show exactly how the drug Arbidol stops influenza infections. The research reveals that Arbidol stops the virus from entering host cells by binding within a recessed pocket on the virus.

The researchers believe this new structural insight could guide the development of future broad-spectrum therapeutics that would be even more potent against influenza virus.

“This is a very interesting molecule, and now we know where it binds and precisely how it works,” said study senior author Ian Wilson, Hanson Professor of Structural Biology, chair of the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology and member of the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at TSRI.

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Rameshwar U. Kadam, Ian A. Wilson. Structural basis of influenza virus fusion inhibition by the antiviral drug Arbidol. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2016; 201617020 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1617020114

This is a 3-dimensional illustration showing the different features of an influenza virus, including the surface proteins hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA)/CDC