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Abstract: Paradigms of sustainable exploitation focus on population dynamics of prey and yields to humanity but ignore the behavior of humans as predators. We compared patterns of predation by contemporary hunters and fishers with those of other predators that compete over shared prey (terrestrial mammals and marine fishes). Our global survey (2125 estimates of annual finite exploitation rate) revealed that humans kill adult prey, the reproductive capital of populations, at much higher median rates than other predators (up to 14 times higher), with particularly intense exploitation of terrestrial carnivores and fishes. Given this competitive dominance, impacts on predators, and other unique predatory behavior, we suggest that humans function as an unsustainable “super predator,” which—unless additionally constrained by managers—will continue to alter ecological and evolutionary processes globally. Supporting online material
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Abstract: Food-web dynamics arise from predator-prey, parasite-host, and herbivore-plant interactions. Models for such interactions include up to three consumer activity states (questing, attacking, consuming) and up to four resource response states (susceptible, exposed, ingested, resistant). Articulating these states into a general model allows for dissecting, comparing, and deriving consumer-resource models. We specify this general model for 11 generic consumer strategies that group mathematically into predators, parasites, and micropredators and then derive conditions for consumer success, including a universal saturating functional response. We further show how to use this framework to create simple models with a common mathematical lineage and transparent assumptions. Underlying assumptions, missing elements, and composite parameters are revealed when classic consumer-resource models are derived from the general model. Supporting online material
IN THIS MORNING’S William Harvey lecture Axel Pries will challenge basic scientists to explore the ‘black box’ of the microcirculation. ‘To my mind, the coronary microcirculation, the business end of the circulation where oxygen diffuses into cells, represents one of the contemporary frontiers in cardiology research,’ says Pries, from the Charité University of Medicine, Berlin. ‘We still know extraordinarily little about what’s going on here.’
Basic Sciences, Pharmacology, Genomics and Cardiovascular Pathology
Axel Pries will deliver today’s William Harvey lecture on basic science, describing microcircular networks as ‘the business end of the circulation’.
Recent studies show that a substantial number of patients with suspected coronary artery disease examined by coronary angiography have apparently normal arteries, suggesting they suffer from microvascular disease. Such pathologies can be attributed to spasm, coagulation, micro-obstruction by leucocytes, adverse microvascular remodelling, and endothelial dysfunction among other potential mechanisms.
Although there has been an increase in clinical papers addressing the coronary microcirculation, says Pries, the amount of basic science research has declined over the past few decades. ‘What’s needed,’ he adds, ‘is a greater understanding before we can move on to develop treatments.’
Since the microcirculation lies beyond the domain of catheter investigation and intravascular imaging, much of Pries’s work has involved mathematical modelling collaborations with the mathematician Timothy Secomb from the University of Tucson. Adequate function of terminal vascular beds, they suggest, depends on exact adjustment of vessel diameters by adaptive processes. Here they believe a ‘feedback’ system operates through the conduction of electrical signals upstream along arterioles within vascular network, preventing generation of functional arterio-veneous shunts. This conduction relies on the adequate function of connexins forming gap junctions between cells in the vessel wall. ‘The system provides the arteriole with information about the capillaries it is serving,’ explains Pries.
Another focus has been the ‘endothelial surface layer’ or ‘glycocalyx’, a gel like layer around 0.5 μm thick influencing flow resistance, inflammation and permeability. Conditions such as inflammation, diabetes mellitus and hypertension, they believe, have a negative effect on this layer.
Since graduating from the University of Cologne in 1980 Pries has exclusively focused on basic science. While he does not deny there are frustrations, the rewards of the scientific life are worthwhile. ‘Scientists need to be really determined with a thick skin because it can take years to achieve breakthroughs,’ he says. ‘But each morning you’re like a pioneer exploring new territory and don’t know where your journey will take you.’
His advice to young colleagues is to ‘cherish’ the time before administration catches up. For Pries such freedom is now gone. In December 2014 he was appointed Dean of the Charité with shared responsibility for an overall budget of €1.5 billion and 13,000 staff.
To relax he spends time with his wife and two daughters and enjoys wood turning bowls. ‘In a matter of hours you create from scratch something that is beautiful and useful. It’s a refreshing antidote to the irritants of the scientific and administrative processes,’ he says.
ESC William Harvey Lecture on Basic Science 30 Aug 9:20-10:00, Regents Park – The Hub.
It's hard to overestimate the impact of Oliver Sacks on the public's understanding of the brain, its disorders and our diversity as humans.
Sacks's wrote what he called 'romantic science'. Not romance in the sense of romantic love, but romantic in the sense of the romantic poets, who used narrative to describe the subtitles of human nature, often in contrast to the enlightenment values of quantification and rationalism.
In this light, romantic science would seem to be a contradiction, but Sacks used narrative and science not as opponents, but as complementary partners to illustrate new forms of human nature that many at the time found hard to see: in people with brain injury, in alterations or differences in experience and behaviour, or in seemingly minor changes in perception that had striking implications./.../
“I had no room now for this fear, or for any other fear, because I was filled to the brim with music.”
I was a relative latecomer to the work of Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015), that great enchanter of storytelling who spent his life bridging science and the human spirit — partly because I was not yet born when he first bewitched the reading public with his writing, and partly because those early books never made it past the Iron Curtain and into the Bulgaria of my childhood. It was only in my twenties, having made my way to America, that I fell in love with Dr. Sacks’s writing and the mind from which it sprang — a mind absolutely magnificent, buoyed by a full heart and a radiant spirit.
His intellectual elegance bowled me over, and I felt a strange kinship with many of his peculiarities, from the youthful affair with iron — although the 300-pound squats of my bodybuilding days paled before his 600 pounds, which set a state record and earned him the moniker Dr. Squat — to our shared love of Beethoven and Mendelssohn.
Indeed, it was his uncommon insight into the role of music in the human experience that first drew me to Dr. Sacks’s writing. I landed into Musicophiliaand soon devoured his older writings. Both his science and his life were undergirded by a profound reverence for music — music seemed to be this intellectual giant’s greatest form of spirituality. He knew that the life of the mind and the life of the body were one, and understood that music married the two — an understanding he carried in his synapses and his sinews.
Nowhere did this embodied awareness, nor his luminous soul, come more vibrantly alive than in the remarkable story of how he once saved his own life by song and literature while running from a raging bull in a Norwegian fjord, told in his 1974 memoir A Leg to Stand On (public library) — the story by which I shall always remember him.
To commemorate this irreplaceable man, I asked artist Debbie Millman to create a piece of art illustrating the passage that captures not only the heart of that heartening story, but the spirit in which Dr. Sacks inhabited and exited our world.
As the broken instrument of his body is buried motionless and mute into the earth, may the symphony of his spirit live on in his writing with the same eternally resounding vigor as what Dr. Sacks called “one of the world’s great musical treasures” in his final communication with the world:
What a privilege for this world to have been graced with this extraordinary human animal and his fully embodied mind. The only thing left to say is what Dr. Sacks himself wrote to his beloved aunt Lennie, who shaped his life, as she lay dying: “Thank you, once again, and for the last time, for living — for being you.”
*Teaching Ignorance* By JAMIE HOLMESAUG. 24, 2015 IN the mid-1980s, a University of Arizona surgery professor, Marlys H. Witte, proposed teaching a class entitled “Introduction to Medical and Other Ignorance.” Her idea was not well received; at one foundation, an official told her he would rather resign than support a class on ignorance. Dr. Witte was urged to alter the name of the course, but she wouldn’t budge. Far too often, she believed, teachers fail to emphasize how much about a given topic is unknown. “Textbooks spend 8 to 10 pages on pancreatic cancer,” she said some years l...mais »
‘Diamonds from the sky’ approach to turn CO2 into valuable carbon nanofibers Decreasing CO2 to pre-industrial-revolution levels is the goal August 19, 2015 [image: Researchers are generating carbon nanofibers (above) from CO2 , removing a greenhouse gas from the air to make products. (credit: Stuart Licht, Ph.D)] A research team of chemists at George Washington Universityhas developed a technology that can economically convert atmospheric CO2 directly into highly valued carbon nanofibers for industrial and consumer products — converting an anthropogenic greenhouse gas from a climate ch...mais »
Report Switch to Standard View PGC-1α Modulates Telomere Function and DNA Damage in Protecting against Aging-Related Chronic Diseases Shiqin Xiong , Nikolay Patrushev , Farshad Forouzandeh , Lula Hilenski , R. Wayne Alexander[image: correspondence][image: email] Publication stage: In Press Corrected Proof Open Access DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2015.07.047 Open access funded by the Author(s) - PDF (3 MB) - Extended PDF (3 MB) - Download Images(.ppt) - Email Article - Add to My Reading List - Export Citation - Create Citation Alert - Cited by in Sc...mais »
Anti-cancer vaccine uses patient’s own cancer cells to trigger immune responsesAugust 26, 2015 [image: Cancerous melanoma cells shown with their cell bodies (green) and nuclei (blue) are nestled in tiny hollow lumens within the polymeric cryogel (red) structure. (credits: Thomas Ferrante, Sidi A. Bencherif / Wyss Institute at Harvard University)] A new biologically inspired “injectable cryogel whole-cell cancer vaccine” combines patient-specific harvested cancer cells and immune-stimulating chemicals or biological molecules to help the body attack cancer. It has been developed by sci...mais »
Back to school with new cyberlearning tools [image: cyberlearning]Classroom learning technologies fuse computational modeling and data analysis to improve student learning More at http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=136093&WT.mc_id=USNSF_1 This is an NSF Discoveries item.
Download HeartScore On your PC: Download HeartScore directly to your desktop or laptop. * A new Windows-based programme is currently available for:* *Europe low risk:* Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, The Netherlands*, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom. *Europe high risk:* Albania, Algeria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Czech Republic, Egypt, Estonia, Hungary, Kosovo, Lebanon, Libya, Montenegro, Morocco, Poland, Romania, Serb...mais »
Five new practice Guidelines for 2015ESC Congress News 2015 - London29 Aug 2015 ESC CONGRESS 2015 will see the launch of five new ESC Guidelines: on pulmonary hypertension (developed jointly with the European Respiratory Society), ventricular arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death, acute coronary syndromes NSTE, pericardial diseases, and infective endocarditis./.../
« The reproducibility of psychological science Don’t call it a comeback [image: Duchenne_de_Boulogne]The Reproducibility Project, the giant study to re-run experiments reported in three top psychology journals, has just published itsresults and its either a disaster, a triumph or both for psychology. You can’t do better than the coverage in *The Atlantic*, not least as it’s written by Ed Yong, the science journalist who has been key in reporting on, and occasionally appearing in, psychology’s great replication debates. Two important things have come out of the Reproducibility Project. ...mais »
Young brains can take on new functions Article | Aug 28, 2015Recommendations: n/a [image: MIT.] Visual cortex of blind children can be remodeled to process language. In 2011, MIT neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe and colleagues reported that in blind adults, brain regions normally dedicated to vision processing instead participate in language tasks such as speech and comprehension. Now, in a study of blind children, Saxe’s lab has found that this transformation occurs very early in life, before the age of 4. The study, appearing in the *Journal of Neuroscience*, suggests that the brains of ...mais »
*Recomendado pela nossa filha Lúcia Helena Robinson Achutti, jornalista e jurista.* *Tribo amazônica cria enciclopédia de medicina tradicional com 500 páginas* 13 de julho de 2015Filled under Destaques, Newsletter, Notícias 64 Comentários Em uma das grandes tragédias da nossa era, tradições, histórias, culturas e conhecimentos indígenas estão desfalecendo em todo o mundo. Línguas inteiras e mitologias estão desaparecendo e, em alguns casos, até mesmo grupos indígenas inteiros estão em processo de extinção. Isto é o que chama a atenção para uma tribo na Amazônia – o povo Matsés do Br...mais »
Which Nations Consume the Most Water? Much of the life-sustaining resource is traded across national borders By Mark Fischetti | Jun 1, 2012 A vast amount of water is used to produce the food and products that nations consume. Large population is the greatest factor, but inefficient agriculture or dependence on water-intensive cuisine can exacerbate demand; meat consumption accounts for 30 percent of the U.S. water footprint. Certain countries, such as India and the U.S., also export significant quantities of water in the form of food and products, despite their own robust consumption....mais »
Scientists explore the origins of energy in chemical reactions using experimental quantum chemistryAugust 21, 2015 by Lisa Zyga report Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-08-scientists-explore-energy-chemical-reactions.html#jCp [image: experimental quantum chemistry] Chemists propose that the energy, E, in all chemical reactions can be broken down into three components, as shown in this equation. The “X-bar” represents the average binding energy of electrons (the Allen definition of electronegativity), …more
*Reencontrei o texto de meu discurso de formatura e vou coloca-lo como provisório para publica-lo depois de revisado.* *Discurso de Formatura do 2o. gráu em 1952* *Colégio Santa Maria. **SM, RS.* Aloyzio Achutti Escolhemos como lema para nossa formatura, como símbolo e resumo de nosso pensamento neste instante de nossa vida (momento grave, cheio de esperanças, cheio de alegria e também de apreensões), escolhemos algo relativo à vida e ao ideal. Sobre o Ideal da Vida e sobre a Vida Ideal. Que mais, dizei-me, poder-nos-ia preocupar tanto e tanto nos interessar ...mais »
http://www.apple.com/br/education/ipad/itunes-u/ [image: Curso em destaque, Biology: Life on Earth. Explore um mundo desconhecido com o novo curso da E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. Faça a sua inscrição.] [image: Curso em destaque, Biology: Life on Earth. Explore um mundo desconhecido com o novo curso da E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. Faça a sua inscrição.]
IN the mid-1980s, a University of Arizona surgery professor, Marlys H. Witte, proposed teaching a class entitled “Introduction to Medical and Other Ignorance.” Her idea was not well received; at one foundation, an official told her he would rather resign than support a class on ignorance.
Dr. Witte was urged to alter the name of the course, but she wouldn’t budge. Far too often, she believed, teachers fail to emphasize how much about a given topic is unknown. “Textbooks spend 8 to 10 pages on pancreatic cancer,” she said some years later, “without ever telling the student that we just don’t know very much about it.” She wanted her students to recognize the limits of knowledge and to appreciate that questions often deserve as much attention as answers. Eventually, the American Medical Association funded the class, which students would fondly remember as “Ignorance 101.”
Decreasing CO2 to pre-industrial-revolution levels is the goal
August 19, 2015
A research team of chemists at George Washington Universityhas developed a technology that can economically convert atmospheric CO2 directly into highly valued carbon nanofibers for industrial and consumer products — converting an anthropogenic greenhouse gas from a climate change problem to a valuable commodity, they say.
•PGC-1α disruption promotes vascular aging and atherosclerosis
•PGC-1α modulates telomere function and length as well as DNA damage
•High-fat diet reduces PGC-1α-TERT signaling to drive vascular aging and arteriopathy
•Enabling PGC-1α-modulated TERT and ARE/ERE signaling obviates age-related pathology
Summary
Cellular senescence and organismal aging predispose age-related chronic diseases, such as neurodegenerative, metabolic, and cardiovascular disorders. These diseases emerge coincidently from elevated oxidative/electrophilic stress, inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, DNA damage, and telomere dysfunction and shortening. Mechanistic linkages are incompletely understood. Here, we show that ablation of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor γ coactivator-1α (PGC-1α) accelerates vascular aging and atherosclerosis, coinciding with telomere dysfunction and shortening and DNA damage. PGC-1α deletion reduces expression and activity of telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) and increases p53 levels. Ectopic expression of PGC-1α coactivates TERT transcription and reverses telomere malfunction and DNA damage. Furthermore, alpha lipoic acid (ALA), a non-dispensable mitochondrial cofactor, upregulates PGC-1α-dependent TERT and the cytoprotective Nrf-2-mediated antioxidant/electrophile-responsive element (ARE/ERE) signaling cascades, and counteracts high-fat-diet-induced, age-dependent arteriopathy. These results illustrate the pivotal importance of PGC-1α in ameliorating senescence, aging, and associated chronic diseases, and may inform novel therapeutic approaches involving electrophilic specificity.
ALPHA LIPOIC ACID (ALPHA-LIPOIC ACID) OVERVIEW INFORMATION
Alpha-lipoic acid is a vitamin-like chemical called an antioxidant. Yeast, liver, kidney, spinach, broccoli, and potatoes are good sources of alpha-lipoic acid. It is also made in the laboratory for use as medicine.
Alpha-lipoic acid is used for diabetes and nerve-related symptoms of diabetesincluding burning, pain, and numbness in the legs and arms. High doses of alpha-lipoic acid are approved in Germany for the treatment of these symptoms.
Alpha-lipoic acid is also used to treat eye-related disorders, such as damage to the retina, cataracts, glaucoma, and an eye disease called Wilson’s disease.
How does it work?
Alpha-lipoic acid seems to help prevent certain kinds of cell damage in the body, and also restores vitamin levels such as vitamin E and vitamin C. There is also evidence that alpha-lipoic acid can improve the function and conduction of neurons in diabetes.
Alpha-lipoic acid is used in the body to break down carbohydrates and to make energy for the other organs in the body.
Alpha-lipoic acid seems to work as an antioxidant, which means that it might provide protection to the brain under conditions of damage or injury. The antioxidant effects might also be helpful in certain liver diseases.
Luis Serratosa 
