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Why Your DNA Isn't Your Destiny
Meet the Epigenome
The answer lies beyond both nature and nurture. Bygren’s data — along with those of many other scientists working separately over the past 20 years — have given birth to a new science called epigenetics. At its most basic, epigenetics is the study of changes in gene activity that do not involve alterations to the genetic code but still get passed down to at least one successive generation. These patterns of gene expression are governed by the cellular material — the epigenome — that sits on top of the genome, just outside it (hence the prefix epi-, which means above). It is these epigenetic “marks” that tell your genes to switch on or off, to speak loudly or whisper. It is through epigenetic marks that environmental factors like diet, stress and prenatal nutrition can make an imprint on genes that is passed from one generation to the next.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1952313,00.html#ixzz1qo5Vwkuy
Dr. Michio Kaku: “The World in 2030”
Nova - Magnetic Storm - Earth’s Invisible Shield
Could the Earth lose it’s magnetic field?
Quality doc.
Athene’s Theory of Everything
NOVA - The Fabric of the Cosmos: What Is Space?
Surprising clues indicate that space is very much something and not nothing.
Acclaimed physicist Brian Greene reveals a mind-boggling reality beneath the surface of our everyday world.
The universe is more like music than like matter.
—Donald Hatch Andrews (via nirvikalpa) (Source: hallucihoop)
People Aren't Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say
extract:
The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.
The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people’s ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.
As a result, no amount of information or facts about political candidates can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately evaluate them. On top of that, “very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is,” Dunning told Life’s Little Mysteries.
Wheat and Schizophrenia
By Emily Deans, M.D.Schizophrenia is an unfortunate disease of the brain. A progressive disorder, it often presents with social withdrawal, paranoia, hearing voices, that sort of thing. After quite a while (sometimes decades) you get a kind of “burnout” effect where the voices and whatnot lessen, but the afflicted is left with all the negative symptoms of social withdrawal, thought blocking, and an inexpressiveness known as “flat affect.” MRI of the brain will show “large ventricles” at this point, meaning cell death (brain damage) has caused the active, lively part of the brain to shrink. You’ll see schizophrenia in any large public park in any major city. If you ask the guy on the bench that everyone is avoiding if he wants something to eat, and he answers with paranoid meaningless word salad, that’s schizophrenia, most likely. He had parents, brothers, sisters, maybe even a college degree. Even if he wanted to stay in a treatment facility or group home, in most places there aren’t enough spots for all the mentally ill, so many end up homeless or in jail. A tough road for someone with an organic brain disease.
Most of the research on schizophrenia is focused on the neurotransmitters dopamine, acetylcholine, and histamine and genetic polymorphisms of transporters and receptors. The usual questions are asked about ineffective brain chemistry. The usual treatment is neuroleptic medication (hopefully decreases excess dopamine in the right place and leaves it well enough alone in other corners of the brain). And I’ve seen medicine do a decent job of clearing up the psychosis symptoms many times. Medicine tends to have pretty serious side effects, though, so a big push in research these days is to identify those folks at high risk for schizophrenia before it happens, hopefully to prevent the illness in the first place through various means. Often those means include more medications - but with Big Pharma funding many studies, those are the solutions that are found.
One intrepid researcher, F. Curtis Dohan, spent a lot of his career chasing an unlikely suspect in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia, wheat. His fascinating paper, Genetic Hypothesis of Idiopathic Schizophrenia: It’s Exorphin Connection , can be found in free full text via the link.
Anyway, there’s a funny thing about schizophrenia, turns out that quite a few of the adult schizophrenics on an inpatient psychiatric unit in 1967 happened to have a major history of celiac disease (gluten/wheat intolerance) as children. As in 50-100 times the amount of celiac disease that one would expect by chance. Celiac doctors also noticed their patients were schizophrenic about 10X as often as the general population. That’s a lot! In addition, epidemiological studies of Pacific Islanders and other populations showed a strong, dose-dependent relationship between grain intake and schizophrenia. The gluten-free populations had extremely rare occurrence of schizophrenia - just 2 in 65,000 versus about 1 in 100 as we have in the grain-eating West. When populations Westernized their diets (flour, sugar, and beer), schizophrenia became common. In some clinical trials, gluten made new-onset acutely ill schizophrenics much worse, but only occasional long-term patients responded to gluten restriction. The long-term sufferer has already had a lot of damage - if wheat somehow toxic to the brain, then it would be vital to stop the insult early on in the course of the disease to see improvement.
National Institutes of Health investigators looked for poisonous protein fragments derived from gluten, gliadin (wheat proteins), and casein (a milk protein). They found them - potent opiate (yes, opiate as in morphine. Or heroin) analogs they called “exorphins.” Many of these studies were done in rats, and the results are very creepy if you are fond of bread and milk (or rats). Turns out, you take wheat gluten, add stomach enzymes, and you end up with fragments of proteins that are potent opiates (1 ). The cute thing is these fragments aren’t digested by the small intestine and definitely end up in the body and brain of rats that are fed gluten orally. Inject these same proteins directly into the brains of poor unfortunate rats, and you get rat seizures. Interestingly, people with schizophrenia seem to have a lot of these opioid-like small gluten-derived peptides in their urine. Way more than people without schizophrenia.Let me review what is perhaps the most important part of the Dohan paper - a gluten-free diet definitely improved some of the new-onset schizophrenics on the inpatient unit. Not all of them. But 2 out of 17 or so. Putting back the wheat made the affected a lot worse. In another study, 115 patients on a locked ward were all given a gluten free milk free diet. They were released into the community on average twice as fast as the similar patients on another, diet as usual ward (p=.009). It is of note that repeat studies didn’t show the same thing, but instead of 17 or 115 patients, these studies had 4 or 8 patients, and these were studies of people who had schizophrenia for many years, where much damage was already done.
Historically, prior to WWII, when grain consumption was super-high and neuroleptics (those medications, as you recall, which affect brain dopamine levels and are used to treat schizophrenia) did not yet exist, there are reports of schizophrenics having marked and unexplained fluctuations in weight and gut symptoms, poor iron absorption just like celiac sufferers, and “post-mortem abnormalities like those subsequently discovered in celiac patients.” Why aren’t these found now? Well, Dohan contended that a side effect of these neuroleptic medications is that they decrease the permeability of the gut. Meaning gluten may not be able to weasel through quite so easily.
Which begs the question, is that the side effect? Or perhaps the principle effect? Who knows? Dohan’s paper was published in 1988 and ended with some ideas about how to study the question further (such as by feeding identical twins of schizophrenics a high gluten diet to see what happens - somehow I don’t think that experimental design would pass an institutional review board nowadays.) Well, nothing much happened research-wise until around 2005, but what has been discovered is interesting. There is no “smoking gun,” but there certainly is a lot of smoke.
In Markers of Gluten Sensitivity and Celiac Disease in Recent-Onset Psychosis and Multi-Episode Schizophrenia it was found that individuals with recent-onset psychosis and with multi-episode schizophrenia who have increased antibodies to gliadin may share some immunologic features of celiac disease, but their immune response to gliadin differs from that of celiac disease.
In this very clever work done by Samaroo and Dickerson et al, published as Novel immune response to gluten in individuals with schizophrenia , immune responses and celiac disease biomarkers were tested in schizophrenics. It turns out that schizophrenics tended to have a lot of anti-wheat antibodies floating around in their systems, but these antibodies were nearly entirely different from the ones that people with celiac disease have. That means that the usual test for gluten issues, the tests for celiac, wouldn’t come up positive in schizophrenics, even though they have unusual immune reactions to wheat.
In A Case Report of the Resolution of Schizophrenic Symptoms on a Ketogenic Diet , a high fat, low carb, low protein diet (thus very low in wheat) results in the remission of psychotic symptoms in a single case report.
The bottom line? Schizophrenia is a progressive and destructive psychotic mental illness that, at the moment, can sometimes be managed with medications and community therapeutic support, but does not have a cure. It seems that a certain subset of schizophrenics have an unusual immune response to gluten and other various wheat proteins, and in a small number, going wheat-free has been extremely helpful. A gluten-free diet is safe and doesn’t have side effects - I don’t see a good argument against giving it a try for anyone with schizophrenia who is willing to give it a go, at least for three months. The worst thing that happens is you find you are not one of the gluten-sensitive schizophrenics, and you’ve gone without bread and pasta for a little while. The best thing that happens is that your symptoms get better, possibly quite a lot better.
source: psychology today
BBC Horizon’s Super-String Theory
Immortal worms defy aging
Researchers from The University of Nottingham have demonstrated how a species of flatworm overcomes the aging process to be potentially immortal.
The discovery, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is part of a project funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and Medical Research Council (MRC) and may shed light on the possibilities of alleviating aging and age-related characteristics in human cells. Planarian worms have amazed scientists with their apparently limitless ability to regenerate. Researchers have been studying their ability to replace aged or damaged tissues and cells in a bid to understand the mechanisms underlying their longevity.
(Source: azspot)
When Scientists Choose Motherhood
When Scientists Choose Motherhood
Jennifer was an extremely talented undergraduate, majoring in mathematics and engineering. Her grades and test scores were nearly perfect; her professors saw a bright future for her as an engineering professor and encouraged her to pursue a doctorate. In graduate school, she continued to excel, accumulating high-quality publications, fellowships and awards. She landed a premier postdoctoral position and was headed for a first-tier professorship. But she never applied for a tenure-track academic job. As a 33-year-old postdoc, she could not imagine waiting to have children until after tenure at age 40, nor could she imagine how she would juggle caring for a young family with the omnipresent demands of an assistant professorship. The harried lives of the two tenured mothers in her department convinced her that such a path was not for her. Jennifer made the choice to have a family and teach mathematics part-time at a local community college.Although it’s not hard to find evidence of women professors’ many successes in the academy, scenarios like Jennifer’s are all too common.[…]
If we are to truly equalize the professional opportunities in science, a field where “expertise” takes in the neighborhood 10 years of post collegiate training, we must provide ample and fair support for young families. Fathers too, sure, but the stigma of motherhood and the false conflict that has been built between having children and being able to compete for jobs in professional science. It seems like Sophie’s Choice, only between doing what you love or creating something you love.
This would be a good time to tell you all about DoubleXScience (also on Twitter), a blog collaboration designed to highlight the challenges and successes of doing science with two X chromosomes.
It’s about more than the dangers of having kids later in life and creating a real-life Idiocracy. It’s about continuing to rid sexual bias from a world where it has been deeply rooted for decades. Has anyone had thoughts or experiences about this fork in life’s road?
DNA Teleportation
Nobel Prize winner Luc Montagnier describes a phenomenon in which DNA emits electromagnetic signals of its own construction, “ghost DNA” that can be mistaken by enzymes as the real deal and replicated in another place. Essentially, it’s DNA teleportation. Montagnier, et al.
A Nobel prize winning scientist who shared the 2008 prize for medicine for his role in establishing the link between HIV and AIDS has stirred up a good deal of both interest and skepticism with his latest experimental results, which more or less show that DNA can teleport itself to distant cells via electromagnetic signals. If his results prove correct, they would shake up the foundations upon which modern chemistry rests. But plenty of Montagnier’s peers are far from convinced.
The full details of Montagnier’s experiments are not yet known, as his paper has not yet been accepted for publication. But he and his research partners have made a summary of his findings available. Essentially, they took two test tubes – one containing a fragment of DNA about 100 bases long, another containing pure water – and isolated them in a chamber that muted the earth’s natural electromagnetic field to keep it from muddying the results. The test tubes were housed within a copper coil emanating a weak electromagnetic field.
Several hours later, the contents of both test tubes were put through polymerase chain reactions to identify any remnants of DNA – a process that subjected the contents to enzymes that would make copies of any DNA fragments they found. According to Montagnier, the DNA was recovered from both tubes even though the second should have only contained water.
Montagnier and his team say this suggests DNA emits its own electromagnetic signals that imprint the DNA’s structure on other molecules (like water). Ostensibly this means DNA can project itself from one cell to the next, where copies could be made – something like quantum teleportation of genetic material, a notion that is spooky on multiple levels.
Naturally, there is plenty of skepticism to go around regarding these findings, ranging from outright dismissal to measured doubt. Indeed, it’s a pretty radical notion: DNA replicating itself through “ghost imprints” rather than the usual cellular processes. More details will emerge when the paper is published in a peer-reviewed journal, as it is likely to be. The findings will then have to be repeated in multiple independent studies to be considered valid, something that will take some time. In the meantime, expect these findings to draw equal parts intrigue and skeptical scrutiny.
MIT Open Coursew Ware: Gödel, Escher, Bach - Lecture 1: Part 1 of 7
This is a treat…
Scientists explore ways to create artificial living tissue using an inkjet printer
The technique could eventually allow scientists to ‘print’ living forms that resemble human tissue, which could be used for drug testing.
