User Datas & Informations

February 16th, 2008 by Mylo

What if you could convince people to trust you and take risks for you with just a few drops of liquid surreptitiously placed in their water? There would be no drunkenness, no rufie-esque glazed eyes: just pure, human trust created via chemicals. The person wouldn’t even know they’d been dosed. A study coming out tomorrow in the journal Neuron explains how this scenario is possible today, with just a small dose of the brain chemical oxytocin.
Oxytocin is a chemical associated with many of the “pleasurable” feelings you have, from basic trust, to love and orgasm. Researchers in Switzerland theorized that people playing social trust games might change their behaviors if given doses of oxytocin, since the chemical might artificially enhance their willingness to trust someone. Indeed, they were right: subjects dosed with Oxytocin were willing to trust people even after they’d been explicitly told that those people had behaved in untrustworthy ways in the past. People who had not been dosed did not trust the “untrustworthy” people.

February 3rd, 2008 by Mylo

Lightning comes from thunderclouds, known as cumulonimbus, which are created when hot moist air rises into the atmosphere and condenses. Hot air rises when heated by the sun, carrying water vapor into the sky. As it rises, the hot air mingles with colder air, and the moisture condenses into water droplets. Clouds are created when these water droplets become visible. The droplets increase in size as the cloud grows and eventually become so heavy that they fall as rain. Thunderclouds are large, anvil-shaped masses that can stretch miles across at the base, and reach 40,000 feet or more into the atmosphere.

The genesis of lightning is a subject of great theoretical debate, says Dr. Vladimir Rakov of the Lightning Research Center at the University of Florida. We know that electrical charges build up within thunderclouds, but there is no single theory that fully describes why. One commonly discussed thesis suggests that small cloud particles acquire a positive charge, while other larger particles become negatively charged. These particles eventually separate, and the upper part of the cloud becomes positively charged, while the lower part becomes negatively charged.

The attraction, or electrical potential, between the positive and negative charges eventually grows strong enough to overcome the air’s resistance to electrical flow. Racing toward each other, the charges connect, completing an electrical circuit, and discharging the accumulated electricity as lightning. Cloud-to-cloud lightning is the most common form of electrical discharge. Only about one-third of all discharges are cloud-to-ground. Bolts that shoot from cloud-to-air, known as “bolts from the blue,” are even less common, but can strike up to 10 miles away.

When the current is discharged, it is accompanied by a flash containing millions of volts of electricity. This is a huge amount of energy, and the surrounding air is heated up to 54,000° Fahrenheit, five times hotter than the surface temperature of the Sun. The rapidly expanding heated air also produces tremendous shock waves, which become audible as the sound of thunder.

Although the flash and resulting thunder occur at essentially the same time, light travels at 186,000 miles per second, almost a million times faster than the speed of sound. The flash, if not obscured by clouds, is seen long before the thunder is heard.

January 10th, 2008 by Mylo

Ever since the discovery of the bust of Nefertiti, this beautiful limestone portrait has been regarded as one of the greatest art masterpieces in the world. It was found in the atelier of the famed ancient Egyptian sculptor Thutmose at Tel el Amarna
, by the German expedition of 1912. Chief archaeologist Ludwig Borchard was so awed by its stunning beauty, that he devised a scheme to smuggle the piece out of Egypt.

Every archaeological discovery had in those days to be brought before the Egyptian Antiquities Authority for inventory and distribution between Egypt and the archaeological expedition. This committee supervised the split between the objects that stayed in Egypt and those that were allowed to leave the country. Borchard did not clean the bust and intentionally covered it in gypsum to make it look of lesser worth when he presented it to the Egyptian authorities for the partition.The painted limestone bust was put on exhibit in Berlin’s Egyptian Museum in 1923, eleven years after its discovery. The Egyptian government has since made attempts to have the bust returned, but Germany has so far refused. Even Hitler felt in love with the non Arian Egyptian lady, and announced that it would remain in Germany forever.Nefertiti has been in Germany for nine decades. Visitors come from all over the world to admire her eternal beauty. Hopefully, in the near future, she will return to her homeland and the new Grand Egyptian Museum. Almost a century after the amazing discovery of the bust of Nefertiti, the meaning of her name still holds the promise of her return: “The Beautiful One has Come”.

December 30th, 2007 by Mylo

Information on Histogenetic Probes and Diagnostic Aids:

Acquaporins
Acquaporins are water channel proteins found in the membranes along the nephron. These proteins allow you to recognize what part of the nephron you are visualizing, as different acquaporins are expressed differently along an individual nephron. Moreover, renal tumors can be revealed.

Acquaporin-1 - proximal renal tubule, descending thin limb of Henle’s loop
Acquaporin-2 - collecting ducts only

Actin
Actin is a contractile protein found in almost every cell. It allows for cell motility through changes in its shape. This is a marker of smooth muscle cells and myofibroblasts. Striated muscle actin is used to define rhabdomyosarcoma.

Albumin
Albumin is an abundant extracellular protein, with numerous functions made within hepatocytes, in the liver. Hepatocellular and hepatoid carcinomas can be marked by albumin immunohistochemistry.

Vimentin
Vimentin is one of the cytoplasmic intermediate filaments. Found almost everywhere, it is mainly prominent in mesenchymal cells, such as fibroblasts and endothelial cells. Because of its expression throughout many different cells, vimentin is often used as a positive control for the immunohistochemistry reaction.

WT-1
WT-1 is a transcription factor, found in Wilm’s Tumor (WT). WT-1 is also expressed in mesothelioma and mullerian epithelial neoplasms, such as ovarian serous carcinoma.

Z-protein
Found in the Z-band of striated muscle, the Z-protein can help mark rhabdomyosarcoma.

December 24th, 2007 by Mylo

#1 Your Hand Can Have A Mind On Its Own
Remember Devon Sawa’s character in 1999’s ‘Idle Hands’, a comedy / horror movie about a teen whose hand becomes possessed and goes on a killing spree?

Apparently this movie has some truth in it. The ‘idle hand’ which referred to as the ‘Alien Hand Syndrome’ is an unusual neurological disorder in which the sufferer’s hand seems to take on a mind of its own. This is due to the damage in the medial motor frontal region of the brain and often occurs after a brain surgery, a stroke or an infection of the brain.

The sufferer has no control over the movements of the ‘alien hand’ nor will they have any conscience idea on what that hand is doing. The person suffering from this condition can often feel disconnected with their hand, and feel as if it was not part of their body.

When the suffer is unaware the alien hand can sometime act out complex movements like unbuttoning clothing, using tools or even tearing pieces of clothing. There are no know treatments or cure for ‘Alien Hand Syndrome’ however the best solution is to give this alien hand an object it can play with to keep it distracted from doing anything harmful to the sufferer.

#2 You Could Remove A Large Part of Your Internal Organs and Survive

While the human body may appear fragile, your body is stronger than you could possibly imagine. It is possible for you to survive even after the removal of the spleen, the stomach, one kidney, one lung, 75% of the liver, 80% of the intestines, and almost every organ from the pelvic and groin area. Read the rest of this entry »

December 20th, 2007 by Mylo

Immunohistochemistry is a molecular technique that combines principles from both immunology and biochemistry techniques and principles to the study of histology and pathology by revealing molecules and patterns within cells and tissues.

The first to describe immunohistochemistry was Dr. Coons. The original immunohistochemistry method consisted of an antibody tagged with a fluorescent probe which was developed in rabbits, which was mixed with tissue sections and searched for, under a fluorescent microscope following a period of incubation. Since, numerous advancements and improvements have been done, to make the technique of immunohistochemistry fairly inexpensive and indispensable in both pathology departments and molecular laboratory benches worldwide.

Numerous different procedures are available, however the most commonly used are the peroxidase-antiperoxidase immune complex method and more so, the biotin-avidin immunoenzymatic technique.
 

December 18th, 2007 by Mylo

A research team working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has found an explanation for the extreme sensitivity to mechanical pressure or voltage of a special class of solid materials called relaxors. The ability to control and tailor this sensitivity would allow industry to enhance a range of devices used in medical ultrasound imaging, loudspeakers, sonar and computer hard drives.

Relaxors are highly sensitive piezoelectrics — they change shape when a battery is connected across opposite ends of the material, or they produce a voltage when squeezed.

“Relaxors are roughly 10 times more sensitive than any other known piezoelectric,” explains NIST researcher Peter Gehring. They are extremely useful for device applications because they can convert between electrical and mechanical forms of energy with little energy loss.

A team of scientists from Brookhaven National Laboratory, Stony Brook University, Johns Hopkins University and NIST used the neutron scattering facilities at the NIST Center for Neutron Research (NCNR) to study how the atomic “acoustic vibrations,” which are essentially sound waves, inside relaxors respond to an applied voltage. They found that an intrinsic disorder in the chemical structure of the relaxor crystal apparently is responsible for its special properties.

Atoms in solids are usually arranged in a perfect crystal lattice, and they vibrate about these positions and propagate energy in the form of sound waves. In typical piezoelectric materials, these acoustic vibrations persist for a long time much like the ripples in a pond of water long after a pebble has been thrown in.

Not so with relaxors: these vibrations quickly die out. The research team led by Brookhaven’s Guangyong Xu, compared how the sound waves propagated in different directions, and observed a large asymmetry in the response of the relaxor lattice when subjected to an applied voltage.

“We learned that the lattice’s intrinsic chemical disorder affects the basic behavior and organization of the materials,” says Gehring. The disorder that breaks up the acoustic vibrations makes the material structurally unstable and very sensitive to applied pressure or an applied voltage.

That disorder occurs because the well-defined lattice of atoms alternates randomly between one of three of its elements—zinc, niobium and titanium—each of which carries a different electrical charge.

The research was funded by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences within the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science and the Natural Science and Research Council of Canada