deconversionmovement:

Evolution Skeptics Will Soon be Silenced by Science: Richard Leakey

Richard Leakey predicts skepticism over evolution will soon be history.

Not that the avowed atheist has any doubts himself.

Sometime in the next 15 to 30 years, scientific discoveries will have accelerated to the point that “even the skeptics can accept it,” the Kenyan-born paleoanthropologist said.

“If you get to the stage where you can persuade people on the evidence, that it’s solid, that we are all African, that color is superficial, that stages of development of culture are all interactive, then I think we have a chance of a world that will respond better to global challenges.”

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fyeahuniverse:

^{Pleurosigma, marine diatoms at 200x magnification by Michael Stringer}

pjosepherum:

Happy Plankton @reddit.com

abluegirl:

Scientists turn skin cells into beating heart muscle:

Scientists have for the first time succeeded in taking skin cells from patients with heart failure and transforming them into healthy, beating heart tissue that could one day be used to treat the condition.

The researchers, based in Haifa, Israel, said there were still many years of testing and refining ahead. But the results meant they might eventually be able to reprogram patients’ cells to repair their own damaged hearts.

“We have shown that it’s possible to take skin cells from an elderly patient with advanced heart failure and end up with his own beating cells in a laboratory dish that are healthy and young - the equivalent to the stage of his heart cells when he was just born,” said Lior Gepstein from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, who led the work.

The researchers, whose study was published in the European Heart Journal on Wednesday, said clinical trials of the technique could begin within 10 years.

Heart failure is a debilitating condition in which the heart is unable to pump enough blood around the body. It has become more prevalent in recent decades as advances medical science mean many more people survive heart attacks.

At the moment, people with severe heart failure have to rely on mechanical devices or hope for a transplant.

Researchers have been studying stem cells from various sources for more than a decade, hoping to capitalize on their ability to transform into a wide variety of other kinds of cell to treat a range of health conditions.

There are two main forms of stem cells - embryonic stem cells, which are harvested from embryos, and reprogrammed “human induced pluripotent stem cells” (hiPSCs), often originally from skin or blood.

Gepstein’s team took skin cells from two men with heart failure - aged 51 and 61 - and transformed them by adding three genes and then a small molecule called valproic acid to the cell nucleus.

They found that the resulting hiPSCs were able to differentiate to become heart muscle cells, or cardiomyocytes, just as effectively as hiPSCs that had been developed from healthy, young volunteers who acted as controls for the study.

The team was then able to make the cardiomyocytes develop into heart muscle tissue, which they grew in a laboratory dish together with existing cardiac tissue.

Within 24 to 48 hours the two types of tissue were beating together, they said.

In a final step of the study, the new tissue was transplanted into healthy rat hearts and the researchers found it began to establish connections with cells in the host tissue.

“We hope that hiPSCs derived cardiomyocytes will not be rejected following transplantation into the same patients from which they were derived,” Gepstein said. “Whether this will be the case or not is the focus of active investigation.”

Experts in stem cell and cardiac medicine who were not involved in Gepstein’s work praised it but also said there was a lot to do before it had a chance of becoming an effective treatment.

“This is an interesting paper, but very early and it’s really important for patients that the promise of such a technique is not over-sold,” said John Martin a professor of cardiovascular medicine at University College London.

“The chances of translation are slim and if it does work it would take around 15 years to come to clinic.”

Nicholas Mills, a consultant cardiologist at Edinburgh University said the technology needs to be refined before it could be used for patients with heart failure, but added: “These findings are encouraging and take us a step closer to … identifying an effective means of repairing the heart.”

learn-a-little:

The brontosaurus doesn’t exist. The dinosaur was created in 1879 by Othniel Marsh, who was trying to one-up rival paleontologist Edward Cope. The skeleton he assembled was actually a young Apatosaurus, a fact left undiscovered until almost 100 years later.

(Image credit to Animal Planet.)

jtotheizzoe:

Explore the Map of Life!

MappingLife.org is live, and incredibly informative. It has collected biodiversity survey data for tens of thousands of terrestrial and aquatic species around Earth. And it’s all there for you to search and draw maps with.

The data comes from field observations as well as other sources, like museum specimens. You can toggle several different types of observations for each species that you choose, and overlay them on customized Google-based maps.

The map above is one I made just now, showing the known habitats of a few bluefin tuna species (genus Thunnus, because they are critically threatened), African elephants (Loxodonta africana, also fighting with humans to retain their habitat) and sea otters (Enhydra lutris, because I love otters). Here’s a tutorial video.

It’s a tool that’s as much educational as it is fun, and a way for anyone to take part in biodiversity research. It’s all of our planet. They’re all of our species.

Go. Play. Learn. Conserve.

stressface:

One plant yields 3 clues to biofuel crops

The analysis of gene activity by researchers at Iowa State University and determination of protein structures by scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences independently identified three related proteins that appear to be involved in fatty-acid metabolism. The researchers used thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) as the model plant.

The research groups then joined forces to test this hypothesis, demonstrating a role of these proteins in regulating the amounts and types of fatty acids accumulated in plants.

The researchers also showed that the action of the proteins is very sensitive to temperature and that this feature may play an important role in how plants mitigate temperature stress using fatty acids.

The discovery is published online in the journal Nature.

“This work has major implications for modulating the fatty-acid profiles in plants, which is terribly important, not only to sustainable food production and nutrition but now also to biorenewable chemicals and fuels,” says corresponding author Joseph Noel, a professor and director of the Jack H. Skirball Center for Chemical Biology and Proteomics at the Salk Institute and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

In this photo: The blue areas in this thale cress plant indicate where the fatty-acid-binding protein one gene is expressed and also correspond to regions where high fatty acids would be synthesized by the plant. (Credit: Eve Syrkin Wurtele and Micheline Ngaki)

Read more here.

(via ikenbot)

sagansense:

You can zoom into this image to read in finer detail - here

mapmeoblivion:

Know Your Neurons

Did you know that neurons come in a variety of extraordinary shapes? Imaged above is Ferris Jabr’s drawing, based on reconstructions and drawings by neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, of different types of neurons: A. Purkinje cell B. Granule cell C. Motor neuron D. Tripolar neuron E. Pyramidal Cell F. Chandelier cell G. Spindle neuron H. Stellate cell. In addition to their varying shapes, they each have different functions.

Some neurons send electrical signals along fibers that stretch several feet; other neurons’ branches extend only a few millimeters away from the cell body. Some neurons possess a fractal beauty similar to that of ferns and corals: Purkinje cells, for example, often sport finely branched nets, like a sea fan. But some of their neighbors look more like tangled tumbleweeds. One neuron might appear more or less round under the microscope—like a firework frozen in climax—whereas another might spider through the brain like a daddy longlegs.

Excitatory neurons mostly stimulate other cells; inhibitory neurons prefer to stifle. Most neurons fire in patterns, but their tempos vary: some keep a steady beat, others remain largely silent except for the occasional burst of activity and still other cells continually fire like a trigger-happy toddler playing laser tag.

This is a part of Ferris Jabr’s Know Your Neurons series where he will be exploring the “cellular diversity of the nervous system.” He goes on to explain the discovery and naming of the neuron.

Read More

ikenbot:

Tracking Ocean Sulfur Could Help Test Gaia Hypothesis

A few months ago I posted an article on the cwl blog explaining the Gaia theory, it’s essentially a theory that states there could be an underlying system of control covering the Earth, a system that acts to the survival of the planet. Here’s a nice accompanying article by Wired delving into a new research published which attempts to prove or disprove the Gaia theory:

Geologists at the University of Maryland have published research that could help prove or disprove Gaia theory — the notion that the Earth is one single self-regulating system.

The concept dates from the 70s and was initially formulated by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. It proposes that all organisms and their inorganic surroundings comprise a single system that maintains the conditions for life on Earth. It was initially met with skepticism from the scientific community, and remains somewhat controversial, but is now an important area of research in Earth systems science and biogeochemistry.

If the Gaia hypothesis is correct, then a number of signals should be observable in the Earth’s natural cycles and systems. One of those is that a sulfur compound made by organisms in the ocean should be stable enough in water to allow its transfer into the air, so it can then be returned to land. A team of geologists, geochemists and marine biologists led by Harry Oduro has developed a method of tracking the movement of sulfur through ocean organisms, the atmosphere and the land, potentially yielding evidence as to how strong this cycle is.

Oduro and his colleagues tracked two compounds — dimethylsulfoniopropionate (or DMSP), which is produced by plant plankton and seaweed in the ocean, and dimethylsulphide, which has a distinctive cabbage-like smell, and is produced when marine microbes break down DMSP.

By examining the differences in the isotope ratios between the compounds over time, the researchers were able to trace unique combinations of an element’s radioactive isotopes, keeping track of them to determine the rate at which the microbes metabolize DMSP into dimethylsulfide, and therefore get clues as to how fast it’s transferred from the ocean into the atmosphere.

Full Article

matthen:

Visualising extinctions over the past million 531 years.  The size of the circle shows how the biodiversity of the earth differs from the long-term trend.  The resulting fluctuations seem to repeat every 62 million years or so, with 5 main extinction events in total.  The most recent was of course the end of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago.  Does this mean the Earth is due another?! [This follows the analysis of an interesting nature article]  [more] [code]

(via ikenbot)

fyeahuniverse:

^{Streptococcus pneumoniae in tissue culture}

^{This guy is quite the specimen; asides from causing pneumococcal infections like pneumonia, he can also cause acute sinusitis, otitis media, meningitis, bacteremia, sepsis, osteomyelitis, septic arthritis, endocarditis, peritonitis, pericarditis, cellultitis, and brain abscess.}

^{(Image credit: Albaraa Mehdar)}