Posts

January 26, 2013

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4:13 PM | Mr. Marek Mis Marek Mis Photography - Suwalki, Poland Specimen:...

Mr. Marek Mis Marek Mis Photography - Suwalki, Poland Specimen: Cosmarium (desmid species) near the sphagnum leaf (100x) Technique: Polarized light with retarders

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9:23 AM | New Mutations Discovered Driving Malignant Melanoma

The researchers said these cancer-associated mutations are the first to be discovered in the vast...

January 25, 2013

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10:09 PM | “Late night labwork”

“Late night labwork”

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10:06 PM | Dedication

Dedication

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10:03 PM | lol

lol

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8:19 PM | Caffeine crystals This false-coloured scanning electron...

Caffeine crystals This false-coloured scanning electron micrograph (SEM) shows caffeine crystals. Caffeine is a bitter, crystalline xanthine alkaloid that acts as a stimulant drug. Beverages containing caffeine - such as coffee, tea, soft drinks and energy drinks - are extremely popular, and 90 per cent of adults consume caffeine daily. In plants, caffeine functions as a defence mechanism. Found in varying quantities in the seeds, leaves and fruit of some plants, caffeine acts as a natural […]

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8:13 PM | medicinenotes: Overall Winner - Intracranial recording for...

medicinenotes: Overall Winner - Intracranial recording for epilepsy This photograph shows the surface (cortex) of a human brain belonging to an epileptic patient, displaying the arteries and veins that supply its nutrients and oxygen. This photograph was taken before an intracranial electrode recording procedure, in which a flexible electrode grid is attached to the surface of the brain. The patient is then taken to the telemetry ward, where they are observed and recorded for a period of up to […]

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1:06 PM | Which Came First: The Chicken or the Egg?

Which Came First: The Chicken or the Egg?

January 24, 2013

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10:51 PM | Math vs. Stats: A Fight to the…Bank?

Hi there! This is my first time writing a blog post, so I hope you enjoy it! My name is Samantha Tyner, and I’m a first year grad student in Statistics at Iowa State University. I graduated from Augustana College in Rock Island, Il in May 2012, with a BA (yes, a BA, not a [...]

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10:02 PM | On the roof of UTSW parking lot

Filed under: science

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7:50 PM | “PhD…Permanent head Damage”

“PhD…Permanent head Damage”

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5:49 PM | Life in HD High definition televisions make everything look...

Life in HD High definition televisions make everything look sharp and crisp – individual blades of grass sway on football fields, the occasional hair might be spotted on a celebrity’s chin. So just imagine what our insides might look like in HD. Here, a technique called Structured Illumination Microscopy was used to sharpen-up the textures of a single human cell. Hundreds of low-resolution images were taken from slightly different angles, then reconstructed into a high-resolution image to […]

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5:45 PM | Do you need to be told about chaos, or is your desk a permanent...

Do you need to be told about chaos, or is your desk a permanent example? As everyone knows, beneath what those intolerably neat and tidy people consider to be chaos, there is a form of order. The chaotic housekeeper can always find the item of their desire - as long as no-one tidies up! Many systems which scientists have considered totally random, unpredictable and without form have now been found to be otherwise. There is form and pattern hidden within the CHAOS . It is a part of the natural […]

January 23, 2013

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8:28 PM | A fractal is an object or quantity that displays...

A fractal is an object or quantity that displays self-similarity, in a somewhat technical sense, on all scales. The object need not exhibit exactly the same structure at all scales, but the same “type” of structures must appear on all scales. A plot of the quantity on a log-log graph versus scale then gives a straight line, whose slope is said to be the fractal dimension. The prototypical example for a fractal is the length of a coastline measured with different length rulers. The shorter […]

January 22, 2013

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6:49 PM | Jens Rüchel Department of Zoology - University of Osnabrück -...

Jens Rüchel Department of Zoology - University of Osnabrück - Osnabrück, Germany Specimen: Spirorbis sp. (aquatic worm) (10x) Technique: Confocal

January 21, 2013

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5:29 PM | Dr. Gowers and Mr. Hyde

Last year at this time, Timothy Gowers famously used his blog to voice discontent towards the publishing practices of Elsevier. Two posts in recent days provide a glimpse into the work he’s contributed towards correcting the issues he recorded. This work is not without criticism, which he addresses in the first post: Why I’ve joined [...]

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5:29 PM | The Not-So-Strange Case of Dr. Gowers and Mr. Hyde

Last year at this time, Timothy Gowers famously used his blog to voice discontent towards the publishing practices of Elsevier. Two posts in recent days provide a glimpse into the work he’s contributed towards correcting the issues he recorded. This work is not without criticism, which he addresses in the first post: Why I’ve joined [...]

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12:05 AM | Extreme Asymmetric Division By Sybille Pfender and Melina...

Extreme Asymmetric Division By Sybille Pfender and Melina Schuh, MRC, UK Now, let’s return back to the mammalian world. For a human or mouse oocyte to mature into a fertile egg, it must first extrude half its chromosomes into a small cell, called the polar body. Recently, Pfender and colleagues identified the actin nucleators Spire as key factors for this extreme asymmetric division in mouse oocytes. Spire1 and Spire2 help assemble an actin network that positions the spindle […]

January 20, 2013

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3:30 PM | Full-Color Mathematics: Reviewing Logicomix

You don’t necessarily think of graphic novels and the history of mathematical logic as things that would partner well, but Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth demonstrates just how seamlessly they can fit together. Written by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou, with art by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna, Logicomix tells the life [...]

January 19, 2013

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8:45 PM | SPOTing Death By Dan Nowakowski, Campbell Strong, and Gaël...

SPOTing Death By Dan Nowakowski, Campbell Strong, and Gaël McGill at Digizyme, Inc., with input from Hao Wu, Weill Cornell, and Vishva Dixit, Genentech Activation of programmed cell death is a highly orchestrated process, which ultimately converges on the activation of caspases required to induce apoptosis. On the cell surface, Fas receptors (Fas) trimerize when they bind the Fas ligand. Inside the cell, the tails of Fas recruit a variety of proteins that contain death domains and death […]

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9:08 AM | med-wissenschaftlerin: Zwei Veränderungen des Gehirns sind...

med-wissenschaftlerin: Zwei Veränderungen des Gehirns sind typisch für Alzheimer: Zum einen bilden sich zwischen den Nervenzellen klumpige Ablagerungen aus einem Protein namens Beta-Amyloid, kurz Abeta, und zum anderen entstehen innerhalb der Zellen faserartige Strukturen und lange Bündel aus einem weiteren Protein namens Tau. Erstere werden als senile Plaques bezeichnet, letztere als Neurofibrillen. Welche Rolle sie jeweils genau bei Ausbruch der Krankheit spielen, ist bisher noch unklar. […]

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9:08 AM | dnamylove: Detailed explanation of mRNA Translation All mRNAs...

dnamylove: Detailed explanation of mRNA Translation All mRNAs are read in the 5´ to 3´ direction, and polypeptide chains are synthesized from the amino to the carboxy terminus. Each amino acid is specified by three bases (a codon) in the mRNA, according to a nearly universal genetic code. The basic mechanics of protein synthesis are also the same in all cells: Translation is carried out on ribosomes, with tRNAs serving as adaptors between the mRNA template and the amino acids being […]

January 17, 2013

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7:24 PM | Tube Breakdown By Dr. Peijun Zhang, Structural Biology,...

Tube Breakdown By Dr. Peijun Zhang, Structural Biology, University of Pittsburgh Depicted is an electron tomography image of degenerating neurons from ion regulatory protein (IRP) knockout mice, which develop progressive neurodegenerative symptoms that resemble human movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. The 3D tomogram was reconstructed from a series of TEM projection images tilted from -70° to +70° with an interval of 2°, and then segmented based on structural features, and […]

January 16, 2013

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12:02 AM | A mathematical concept that explains that it is possible to get...

A mathematical concept that explains that it is possible to get random results from normal equations. The main precept behind this theory is the underlying notion of small occurrences significantly affecting the outcomes of seemingly unrelated events. Chaos theory has been applied to many different things, from predicting weather patterns to the stock market. Simply put, chaos theory is an attempt to see and understand the underlying order of complex systems that may appear to be without […]

January 15, 2013

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11:57 PM | sunsetandcamphor: Second picture from biology today! Posted...

sunsetandcamphor: Second picture from biology today! Posted both of them on deviantart, titled “Beautiful science”.

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11:53 PM | Dr. Jaswant Singh Department of Veterinary Biomedical Sciences -...

Dr. Jaswant Singh Department of Veterinary Biomedical Sciences - University of Saskatchewan - Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada Specimen: Heated micropipette containing oocytes (mammalian eggs) (20x) Technique: Brightfield, Phase Contrast

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12:05 AM | Photo

No summary available for this post.

January 14, 2013

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11:16 PM | kambiz: City lights and neurons show striking similarities to...

kambiz: City lights and neurons show striking similarities to in these side-by-side comparisons by Infinity Imagined. The city light photos were taken aboard the International Space Station, while the neuron images were created with fluorescence microscopy.

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9:41 PM | Bronchopneumonia at 10x Magnification Infants and the elderly...

Bronchopneumonia at 10x Magnification Infants and the elderly are particularly susceptible to bronchopneumonia, but anyone may contract the disease. Pneumococcal vaccinations are recommended for individuals in high-risk groups and provide up to 80 percent effectiveness in staving off pneumococcal pneumonia. Influenza vaccinations are also frequently of use in decreasing one’s susceptibility to pneumonia, since the flu precedes pneumonia development in many cases. Vaccinations are often […]

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9:37 PM | Ms. Poulomi Ray Clemson University - Clemson, South Carolina,...

Ms. Poulomi Ray Clemson University - Clemson, South Carolina, USASpecimen: Intestinal mucosa of a 7.5 day old chick embryo (60x) Technique: Confocal