Explosion of #life on #Earth linked to heavy #metal act at planetâs centre | #Evolution | The Guardian
Linked to the Earth's #Core and the #MagneticField it produces.
#biology
interesting.... I'm a binge-eating person...
#health #biology #eatingdisorder #bingeeating
Mice Study Reveals a New Signal Pathway in The Brain That Regulates Binge Eating
Scientists have discovered a new signaling pathway in the brain that controls food intake, and it could eventually give us improved treatments for binge eating â perhaps even a drug that turns off the desire to binge eat at the neural level.
https://www.sciencealert.com/newly-discovered-brain-pathway-could-put-an-end-to-binge-eating
#biology #evolution #seadragons
Sea Dragons Are Incredibly Strange Creatures, And We May Finally Know Why
Spotting a wispy sea dragon, floating amongst the seaweed, embellished with leaf-like adornments ruffling in swaying ocean currents, is truly a sight to behold.
But there is more to sea dragons than meets the diver's eye. Bedazzled as they may be, sea dragons are also missing teeth, lacking ribs, and their spines are curved and kinked.
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-secret-to-sea-dragons-fabulous-features-is-in-their-genes
Exercise in a pill. At least that's the idea. "A molecule in the blood that is produced during exercise and can effectively reduce food intake and obesity in mice" has been identified.
"Yong Xu, professor of pediatrics, nutrition, and molecular and cellular biology at Baylor University, Jonathan Long, assistant professor of pathology at Stanford Medicine and an Institute Scholar of Stanford Chemistry, Engineering & Medicine for Human Health, and their colleagues conducted comprehensive analyses of blood plasma compounds from mice following intense treadmill running. The most significantly induced molecule was a modified amino acid called Lac-Phe. It is synthesized from lactate (a byproduct of strenuous exercise that is responsible for the burning sensation in muscles) and phenylalanine (an amino acid that is one of the building blocks of proteins)."
"In mice with diet-induced obesity (fed a high-fat diet), a high dose of Lac-Phe suppressed food intake by about 50% compared to control mice over a period of 12 hours without affecting their movement or energy expenditure. When administered to the mice for 10 days, Lac-Phe reduced cumulative food intake and body weight (owing to loss of body fat) and improved glucose tolerance."
On the flip side, mice lacking an enzyme involved in making Lac-Phe called CNDP2 didn't lose weight as easily.
That's mice. The researchers also found elevated Lac-Phe in humans and racehorses.
"Data from a human exercise cohort showed that sprint exercise induced the most dramatic increase in plasma Lac-Phe, followed by resistance training and then endurance training."
The benefits of exercise in a pill? Science is closer to that goal
Polar bears found living in seemingly impossible habitat
#Whale tale: #humpbacks migrate off eastern #Australia â in #pictures | #Environment | The Guardian
#Wildlife #EndangeredSpecies #Biology #Cetaceans
What Is Life?
Scientists donât really agree on a definition for life. We may recognize life instinctively most of the time, but any time we try to nail it down with set criteria, some stubborn counterexample spoils the effort. Still, can we really search for life on other worlds, or understand the earliest stages of life on this planet, if we donât know what to look for? On this episode...
https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-life-20220615/
#biology
I for one am Plagued by Tinnitus
https://www.sciencealert.com/incessant-tinnitus-seems-to-be-connected-somehow-to-sleep
I don't care for the click-bait headline, but what a cool creature
https://www.livescience.com/alien-glowing-cheeto-sea-cucumber
#biology #humans #twinsstudy
A Pair of Twins Grew Up in Different Countries, Then Scientists Compared Them
https://www.sciencealert.com/pair-of-twins-raised-in-different-countries-reveal-significantly-different-cognitive-abilities
Extinction obituary: why experts weep for the quiet and beautiful Hawaiian poâouli
Frantic conservation efforts couldnât save the tiny, intricately colored songbird, whose obit is the first in our new series of memorials for species that have gone extinct in living memory
The last poâouli died in an unusual nest. Too weak to perch, the brownish-greyish songbird rested in a small towel twisted into a ring. He was the last of his species, the last in fact of an entire group of finches, and occurred nowhere on Earth outside its native Hawaii. For weeks, as scientists tried to find him a mate, he had been getting sicker. The only remaining poâouli had just one eye. Alone in the towel, alone in all the world, he closed it.
#Hawaii #Maui #birds #biology #conservation #extinction #endangered #species #science #climate #wildlife #animals #songbird #Guardian
#health #biology #COVID19 #longCOVID
One Grim Statistic Lays Bare The Truly Relentless Grip of Long COVID
https://www.sciencealert.com/one-grim-statistic-lays-bare-the-truly-relentless-grip-of-long-covid
"For more than a decade, molecular biologist Martin Beck and his colleagues have been trying to piece together one of the world's hardest jigsaw puzzles: a detailed model of the largest molecular machine in human cells.
"This behemoth, called the nuclear pore complex, controls the flow of molecules in and out of the nucleus of the cell, where the genome sits. Hundreds of these complexes exist in every cell. Each is made up of more than 1,000 proteins that together form rings around a hole through the nuclear membrane."
"These 1,000 puzzle pieces are drawn from more than 30 protein building blocks that interlace in myriad ways. Making the puzzle even harder, the experimentally determined 3D shapes of these building blocks are a potpourri of structures gathered from many species, so don't always mesh together well. And the picture on the puzzle's box -- a low-resolution 3D view of the nuclear pore complex -- lacks sufficient detail to know how many of the pieces precisely fit together."
"Then, last July, London-based firm DeepMind, part of Alphabet -- Google's parent company -- made public an artificial intelligence (AI) tool called AlphaFold2."
"This is like an earthquake. You can see it everywhere. There is before July and after."
"This year, DeepMind plans to release a total of more than 100 million structure predictions. That is nearly half of all known proteins -- and hundreds of times more than the number of experimentally determined proteins in the Protein Data Bank (PDB) structure repository."
What's next for AlphaFold and the AI protein-folding revolution
#solidstatelife #ai #biology #proteomics #proteinfolding #deepmind #alphafold
#Microfossils may be evidence #life began âvery quicklyâ after #Earth formed | #Fossils | The Guardian
Crows possess higher intelligence long thought primarily human - STAT
#science #biology #animal #intelligence
Now the birds can add one more feather to their brainiac claims: Research unveiled on Thursday in Science finds that crows know what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds, a manifestation of higher intelligence and analytical thought long believed the sole province of humans and a few other higher mammals.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/09/24/crows-possess-higher-intelligence-long-thought-primarily-human/
