Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Neurochemistry International (Impact Factor: 2.65). 12/2014; DOI: 10.1016/j.neuint.2014.08.008

ABSTRACT We investigated the effects of physical exercise and green tea supplementation (associated or not) on biochemical and behavioral parameters in the time course of normal aging. Male Wistar rats aged 9 month were divided into groups: control, physical exercise (treadmill running), and supplemented with green tea while either performing physical exercise or not. A young control group was also studied. Physical exercise and green tea supplementation lasted 3 months. Afterwards, behavioral and biochemical tests were performed. Biochemical measurements revealed differences in antioxidant and oxidant responses in hippocampus, prefrontal cortex and striatum. Behavioral testing showed age-related memory impairments reversed by physical exercise. The association of green tea supplementation and physical exercise did not provide aged rats with additional improvements in memory or brain oxidative markers. Green tea per se significantly decreased reactive oxygen species levels and improved antioxidant defenses although it did not reverse memory deficits associated with normal aging.

Paris Commune

Eu não sabia ou não havia me dado conta que o movimento da Comuna de Paris aconteceu simultaneamente com a Guerra Franco-Prussiana e serviu de inspiração para K. Marx. Interessante também a reação Americana (que perdura) ao fenômeno...

Today's selection -- from Death in the Haymarket by James Green. In the cataclysmic Franco-Prussian War or 1870 -- Bismarck's war -- the French Army surrendered to the Germans. But the citizens of Paris refused to surrender, and turned against their own French generals as a result, bringing about a bloody civil war fought within the walls of Paris. The citizen leaders that emerged became known as the Paris Commune, and though they ultimately capitulated, they served as inspiration to the nascent communist movement (Karl Marx's Das Kapital had been published in 1867) for decades to come. Americans in particular were fascinated and ultimately horrified, especially given the labor strife that was beginning to emerge in America, and the event was a harbinger of the anti-communist fears that continue even to this day:

"All during the late summer of 1870, ... [American] readers ... intently followed news of the Franco-Prussian War: first the stunning news of the French army's defeat at Sedan, and then the capture of Napoleon III and the fall of his empire. .../.../

Monday, February 23, 2015

Plastic people

Epigenetics has shown that there’s no such thing as a

normal human body, so how did it get hijacked by the body police?

by Julie Guthman and Becky Mansfield 3,200 words

The promise of perfection. Photo by Gallery Stock

Julie Guthman is professor of social sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
She is the author ofAgrarian Dreams: the Paradox of Organic Farming in California(2nd edition, 2014) andWeighing In: Obesity, Food Justice and the Limits of Capitalism(2011)

Becky Mansfield is professor of geography at the Ohio State University. She is the editor
ofPrivatization: Property and the Remaking of Nature-Society Relations(2008).

The past decade has seen an avalanche of paradigm-shattering studies in the
biological, toxicological and behavioural sciences: from findings published
recently inScience and in Nature showing that sperm carry the marks of a
man’s trauma and undernourishment, which leads to depression and metabolic
glitches in his offspring, to the steady flow of research from the lab of the
reproductive biologist Michael Skinner. Skinner’s research at Washington State
University shows that in-utero exposure to environmental chemicals, such as
those in plastics and pesticides, affects reproductive development, obesity and
a wide range of diseases in adulthood. The weight of argument behind such
findings suggests a radical conclusion: namely, that the environment not only
influences the human body, it comes into it, shaping what it is – and who you are.

Such thinking cuts against the grain of what we’ve always thought about the
human body: that its boundary is impermeable, its integrity complete, its unity
sovereign. It suggests that we humans are nothing of the sort. We are porous,
changeable, plastic.

Iwo Jima

O texto da EB confirma que a foto foi realmente montagem. A primeira tinha a bandeira muito pequena foi fotografa na segunda tentativa...

Iwo Jima

Alternate titles: Iō Island; Iō Jima; Iō-tō

Iwo Jima, official Japanese Iō-tō, also called Iō-jima, island that is part of theVolcano Islands archipelago, far southern Japan. The island has been widely known as Iwo Jima, its conventional name, since World War II (1939–45); however, Japan officially changed the name to its Japanese form, Iō-tō (Iō Island), in 2007.

Iwo Jima lies in the western Pacific at a point about 760 miles (1,220 km) south-southeast of Tokyo. The island is irregular in shape; it is about 5 miles (8 km) long and ranges from 800 yards to 2.5 miles (730 metres to 4 km) wide. It has an area of about 8 square miles (20 square km). Administratively, it is part of Tokyo /.../

...The raising of the American flag over Mount Suribachi (February 23), which was photographed by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press, resulted in one of the best-known photographic images of the Pacific war. This picture was widely reprinted, and statues, paintings, and a U.S. postage stamp were based on it. (The photograph actually depicts the second flag raising over Mount Suribachi, after a first flag raised an hour or two earlier had proved too small to be visible to other U.S. troops on the island.)/.../

Paleo, Pastrami

Paleo, Pastrami; Shrinking Planet: Having Mammoth, Eating it, Too?

Feb 19, 2015

363,693Views
714Likes
285Comments

The recent attention to dietary cholesterol, and by extension eggs, has stirred up the customary responses in a world of dietary divisiveness, if not outright dogma. There are rumblings of protest among my many vegan and vegetarian friends and colleagues, who are convinced the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee ran amok, whether for reasons of well-intentioned error or something more nefarious. There are comparable rumblings of celebratory validation among advocates of Paleo diets, convinced this committee finally recognized a vintage truth others had neglected. Enough of both protests find their way to my in-box, that it has been a week of unusual seismic activity for me./.../

Sunday, February 22, 2015

The very early Universe

Ask Ethan #76: The very early Universe

What happened when things were hot enough to spontaneously create matter and antimatter?

in Starts With A Bang!, by Ethan Siegel

9 min read

REVISTA do DERC

Enviado pelo AMICOR Salvador Serra

New Virus

New Killer Virus Found in Kansas

NBC News

Feb. 21, 2015

They're calling it Bourbon virus

Scientists are reporting on a new virus, never seen before anywhere, that apparently killed a Kansas man last year.

They’re calling it Bourbon virus, after the county in Kansas where the previously healthy man lived. He’d been bitten by ticks before he got sick so doctors believe the virus is carried by ticks.

“We were not looking for a new virus,” said Charles Hunt, Kansas state epidemiologist, who helped report on the new virus.

“We are surprised. We really don’t know much about this virus. It’s important to find out more from a public health perspective. It is possible that other persons have been infected with this and not known it?”…

Read the rest of the story from our partners at NBC News

Gender inequality

Gender inequality in academia: not just about numbers (part two of two)

2/20/2015

Comments

Fran Amery, Lecturer in British Politics at the University of Bath and Co-Convenor of the PSA Women and Politics Specialist Group

Yesterday’s post (part one of two) began to cover the tensions facing women in academia and the programs in place to promote women in STEM career fields. Amery continues her thoughts below:

Further to this, academic roles are often gendered. First of all, women are more likely to be employed on part-time and temporary contracts, with the accompanying lack of stability and difficulty of career progression. But academic roles are also gendered in that women are more likely to be assigned stereotypically ‘feminine’ roles. Women are more likely to work in teaching-only positions, or to have a higher teaching load. Additionally, women may be more likely to find themselves engaged in ‘institutional housekeeping’ such as committee work and preparation of reports, alongside the emotional work of pastoral and care roles. These roles are generally institutionally devalued, and unlike research, unlikely to be rewarded with promotion.

Another problem relates to professional networking. Research shows that women have difficulty gaining access to ‘male’ academic networks. This can be due to time constraints – those with childcare responsibilities may not be able to participate in out-of-hours socialising – but in addition women may simply not be invited into these networks. This process can start as early as during doctoral research: women PhD students are less likely to form the same bonds with their male supervisors as men. The effect of this is that women are less likely to be invited to collaborate, less likely to be encouraged to apply for jobs or promotions, and excluded from informal decision-making.

Finally, there is the matter of discrimination. Sexism remains a problem even in ‘enlightened’ academia, and discrimination against BME and working-class women is even more intense. Heather Savigny’s interviews with women academics highlight the cultural sexism women face, from sexualisation to the assumption that ‘women aren’t good at research’. What is most concerning about her findings is the number of women who feared repercussions if they were identified.

While efforts to encourage women and girls into STEM are helpful, they do not tackle many of the underlying problems. These are problems which go beyond raw numbers, and indeed may be concealed when it is assumed that increasing rates of participation lead to lower levels of inequality overall.

2694 - AMICOR 17

Matter and Antimatter

Aloyzio AchuttiemAMICOR - Há 14 segundos

Higgs Boson Could Explain Matter’s Dominance over Antimatter A new theory suggests the Higgs field varied in the early universe, offering matter a chance to split off from antimatter February 20, 2015 |By Clara Moskowitz  [image: Higgs boson particle tracks in LHC] Computer simulation of particle tracks from an LHC collision that produced a Higgs boson. *CERN* The stars, the planets and you and I could just as easily be made of antimatter as matter, but we are not. Something happened early in the universe’s history to give matter the upper hand, leaving a world of things built f... mais »

Time and Space

Aloyzio AchuttiemAMICOR - Há 37 minutos

Do Time and Space Exist at the Smallest Scales? An artist’s impression of a supermassive black hole. Black holes are rife with paradoxes, but a new theory suggests that they can all be resolved by agreeing that space and time break down at very small scales. Image credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser We’ve come a long way in 13.8 billion years; but despite our impressively extensive understanding of the Universe, there are still a few strings left untied. For one, there is the oft-cited disconnect between general relativity, the physics of the very large, and quantum mechanics, the physics of t... mais »

Dama da Noite

Aloyzio AchuttiemAMICOR EXTENSION - Há 10 horas

Ao chegar à janela do quarto na noite passada dei com a imagem da Dama da Noite florescendo, coisa que parece ser pouco frequente. A muda original colocamos há mais de dez anos junto ao muro de nosso jardim dos fundos. Ela foi crescendo e se estendendo, somente agora deu flores. A muda nos deu um amigo e cliente que reside em Ivoti, onde ele era proprietário de uma farmácia. Acontece que este amigo é filho do ex-proprietário da Pharmacia Popular de Agudo (na época Distrito de Cachoeira do Sul) adquirida por nosso pai Bôrtolo Achutti em 1939. Lá vivemos até 1942. Coloco as imagens da ... mais »

DNA Long term data storing

Aloyzio AchuttiemAMICOR - Há 19 horas

How to store data error-free for millions of years February 16, 2015 [image: fossil data storage] ETH researchers have found an error-free way to store information in the form of DNA, potentially preserving it for millions of years: encapsulate the information-bearing segments of DNA in silica (glass), using an error-correcting information-encoding scheme. Scrolls thousands of years old provide us with a glimpse into long-forgotten cultures and the knowledge of our ancestors. In … more…

cognitive enhancers

Aloyzio AchuttiemAMICOR - Há 19 horas

An ‘in silico’ method of predicting effectiveness of cognitive enhancers February 17, 2015 [image: pathway activation profile2] The Biogerontology Research Foundation (BGRF) has used gene expression data to evaluate activated or suppressed signaling pathways in tissues or neurons of the mouse brain that has been cognitively enhanced with nootropic drugs. Currently used cognitive enhancers are those that are widely available, rather than optimal for the user, the researchers note. These include drugs … more…

dark matter

Aloyzio AchuttiemAMICOR - Há 19 horas

Could dark matter cause some mass extinctions and geologic upheavals?February 19, 2015 *[+]* NGC 4565, an edge-on spiral galaxy. The stars, dust and gas are concentrated into a thin disc, much like the one in our Milky Way galaxy (credit: Jschulman555) In Earth’s path around and through our Galaxy’s disc, dark mattermay perturb the orbits of comets and lead to additional heating in the Earth’s core, both of which could be connected with mass extinction events, according to a research finding by New York University Biology Professor Michael Rampino. Writing in an open-access paper pub... mais »

oleocanthal

Aloyzio AchuttiemAMICOR - Há 19 horas

An ingredient in olive oil that appears to kill cancer cells February 20, 2015 [image: (credit: iStock)] A Rutgers nutritional scientist and two cancer biologists at New York City’s Hunter College have found that an ingredient in extra-virgin olive oil kills a variety of human cancer cells without harming healthy cells. The ingredient is oleocanthal, a compound that ruptures a part of the cancerous cell, releasing enzymes that cause cell death. Paul Breslin, professor … more…

Alzheimer's D. ultrasound treatment

Aloyzio AchuttiemAMICOR - Há 19 horas

Attacking Alzheimer’s with ultrasound Opening the blood-brain barrier allows the body to remove plaque in the hippocampus February 20, 2015 The plaque abnormalities on untreated transgenic mice (left) and the brain of a transgenic mouse that has been treated with MR imaging-guided focused ultrasound (right), showing reduced plaque (credit: Kullervo Hynynen, Sunnybrook Research Institute) For the first time, researchers have reversed some of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease* in mice using magnetic resonance (MR) imaging-guided focused ultrasound. As KurzweilAI reported in 2012, Sun... mais »

Musicoterapia

Aloyzio AchuttiemAMICOR - Há um dia

Mending the Brain Through Music Bret S. Stetka, MD, Concetta M. Tomaino, MA, DA, LCAT DisclosuresOctober 29, 2012 - Introduction - Recalling Words and Memories - Who Benefits Most? - Acting, Painting, Listening - References *Editor's Note: * *From a Darwinian perspective, music is a mystery. It's unclear* *whether the human ability to appreciate a catchy melody conferred some specific evolutionary advantage or was a by-product of more general adaptations involving sound and pattern processing. But what *is *known is that evidence of music has been found in every docu... mais »

Oliver Sacks

Aloyzio AchuttiemAMICOR - Há um dia

Oliver Sacks: His Own Life Susan Jeffrey February 19, 2015Dr Oliver Sacks. *Source: Alamy*books - 5 comments After years of tackling difficult neurologic conditions in his practice and his writings, British-born neurologist Oliver Sacks, MD, addresses another disease in an essay today in the *New York Times* — his own terminal illness. In it, Dr Sacks, a professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine and author of many popular including *Awakenings* (which was made into a major motion picture) and *The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,*discusses his diag... mais »

energy/sec. ~ emitted by a trillion suns!

Aloyzio AchuttiemAMICOR - Há um dia

Black Hole Emits ‘Fierce Winds’ That Prevent New Stars Forming - Noah Rayman @noahrayman Feb. 19, 2015 [image: Supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies blast out radiation and ultra-fast winds, as illustrated in this artist's conception.] JPL-Caltech/NASASupermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies blast out radiation and ultra-fast winds, as illustrated in this artist's conception.Shouldn't have eaten that entire galaxy Researchers say that new data from a black hole 2 billion light years away indicate that it emits powerful winds in all directions that help to re... mais »