MaxRedline

On Standing

When you get vertical, your body has to compensate for the changes. Otherwise, you'd just fall over. It's something we tend not to think about, but it all comes down to a couple of proteins and nervous system features that are critical for successfully standing, walking, and so on.

Due to the sudden drop in blood pressure, special neurons called baroreceptors swing into action to compensate – and scientists just figured out more about how they operate. Scripps Research Institute has pinpointed two proteins that sense blood pressure and control the baroreceptor response.

Yep, that's kind of important if you want to do anything more than slither.

 

Actually, It's A Man Thing, But...

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — A new study has found that people that are shorter tend to be angrier and more violent than people that are tall.

The study only involved 600 men, though, so can hardly be regarded as definitive.

Perhaps the Munchkins were exceptions, perhaps not.

Short people got no reason
Short people got no reason
Short people got no reason to live

They got little hands
Little eyes
They walk around tellin' great big lies
They got little noses
And tiny little teeth
They wear platform shoes on their nasty little feet

-Randy Newman

Feelings of inadequacy, perhaps?

 

Nice News For Nancy

Contrary to long-held belief, aging brain cells can, in fact, still grow - and even regenerate new cells. This is great news for old lifer politicians like Pelosi, although there is a catch: for one thing, you actually need a brain.

A new report in the journal Cell Stem Cell reveals there is a trick to it.

Huntington Hospital Neurologist Dr. Yafa Minazad said brain cells do die off as we age but, "There is an opportunity for the brain cells to regenerate unlike what we used to think," she said.

For this to work out, you first need a brain and a functional blood supply. I reckon that's bad news for lifer politicians.

 

Sorry, We're Closed. Alien Outside Should've Told Ya.

FBI agents showed up at the Sunspot solar observatory in tiny Sunspot, New Mexico, on Friday and shut down the facility, evacuating the local area, including the town post office. 

"There was a Blackhawk helicopter, a bunch of people around antennas and work crews on towers, but nobody would tell us anything," Otero County Sheriff Benny House told the Alamogordo Daily News. "I don't know why the FBI would get involved so quick and not tell us anything."

Five days later, the observatory's website confirms the entire facility is closed to both staff and the public until further notice.

All that they're saying at the moment is that there's some sort of security issue there. Maybe the FBI lovers can get involved so they can "leak" the story for us.

 

 

Spook Stuff

From the gee-whiz file:

While vacationing on the coast of Spain in 2012, the computer vision scientist Antonio Torralba noticed stray shadows on the wall of his hotel room that didn’t seem to have been cast by anything. Torralba eventually realized that the discolored patches of wall weren’t shadows at all, but rather a faint, upside-down image of the patio outside his window. The window was acting as a pinhole camera — the simplest kind of camera, in which light rays pass through a small opening and form an inverted image on the other side. The resulting image was barely perceptible on the light-drenched wall. But it struck Torralba that the world is suffused with visual information that our eyes fail to see.

Even the edge of a shadow, he and colleagues found, can reveal what's just around that corner ahead of you. Even a houseplant can be used to eavesdrop:

Last fall, they and their collaborators reported that they can spot someone moving on the other side of a corner by filming the ground near the corner. This summer, they demonstrated that they can film a houseplant and then reconstruct a three-dimensional image of the rest of the room from the disparate shadows cast by the plant’s leaves. Or they can turn the leaves into a “visual microphone,” magnifying their vibrations to listen to what’s being said.

As might be expected, DARPA's interested; they've ponied up $27 million to advance the research. So they've moved up to lasers and what they call "active non-line-of-sight imaging":

The light bounces off a wall, then strikes a hidden object, and then light reflected from the object is bounced back to its point of origin. This enables construction of a 3-D representation of what's back there:

This is some really weird science.

 

Jurassic Park - Russia

Reportedly, Russia plans to construct a cloning facility in the world's coldest city, Yakutsk, in the remote north-east of the country. The plan is to work with other scientists "to study extinct animals from living cells - and to restore such creatures as the woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, cave lion and breeds of long-gone horses". 

It seems a bit far-fetched, but it appears that they want to try it, nonetheless.

 

Medical Marijuana

People genetically at risk of schizophrenia are also more likely to smoke pot, according to a new study published on Monday.

Scientists used data from 23andMe volunteers to find a genetic link between cannabis use and schizophrenia. The disorder might drive people to start smoking pot, the study published in Nature Neuroscience suggests.

The study employed data from over 180,000 individuals.

 

P-R-O-T-E-C-T

Um. Yeah, those hand sanitizers actually don't.

That's not what it means to me.

It's not the 99.9% of germs you need to be worried about - it's that 0.1% that survive (and thrive) after you've cleared the ecosystem so they have an unimpeded playing field.

Bacteria gathered from two hospitals in Australia between 1997 and 2015 appeared to gradually get better at surviving the alcohol used in hand sanitizers, researchers found. The bacteria’s boost in booze tolerance seemed in step with the hospitals’ gradually increasing use of alcohol-based sanitizers within that same time period—an increase aimed at improving sanitation and thwarting the spread of those very bacteria. Yet the germ surveillance data as well as a series of experiments the researchers conducted in mice suggest that the effort might be backfiring and that the hooch hygiene may actually be encouraging the spread of drug-resistant pathogens.

The more the bacteria drink, the higher their resistance to alcohol becomes. They’re just like us!

I've long been skeptical of products that claim to kill 99.9% of this or that. As a longtime zoologist, that tells me that you're inadvertently selecting for resistance by using the product. Looks like the research has caught up with my suspicions.

 

We Meet Again, AIDS

For a while there, we thought we'd driven you into a stalemate; the cost of high-potency anti-aids drugs went from $10,000 a person in 1996 down to $75 per year. But then things went south:

The drugs didn’t cure anybody—HIV still lurks in the bodies of the nearly 22 million treated individuals.

Any interruption in treatment allowed the virus to emerge from its hiding places and re-infect the patient. Plenty of interruptions occurred. Today, the number of infected people is estimated at at least 37 million, worldwide. The number of resultant fatalities is expected to be staggering.

 

In Other News:

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has found organic molecules on Mars, the space agency revealed in a major announcement Thursday.

Scientists have also discovered trace amounts of brain material in Democrats.