*pulls two pieces of paper out a hat* slug….recruitment
*all of tumblr starts chanting slug recruitment*
Tags:
#Runescape #I can’t be the only person who thought of this right? #(I got the picture from the Runescape Wiki) #(of the pictures they have it appears to be the one that best sums up what the sea slugs are)
Did Scientists Just Develop A Viable Cure For Type 1 Diabetes?
In what’s being called one of the most important advances to date in the field, researchers at Harvard have used stem cells to create insulin-producing beta cells in large quantities. Human transplantation trials could only be a few years away.
Above: human-stem-cell derived beta cells. (Douglas Melton)
By using human embryonic stem cells, a research team led by Doug Melton created human insulin-producing beta cells that are virtually equivalent to normally functional beta cells in the kind of large quantities required for cell transplantation and pharmaceutical purposes.
Currently, the cell-derived beta cells are undergoing trials in animal models, including non-human primates.
The results have been published in the latest edition of Cell. In the study, Melton describes a step-by-step procedure that starts with stem cells and results in hundreds of millions of the vital pancreatic cells that secrete the hormone insulin, which keeps blood sugar levels in balance. It’s the lack of insulin produced by those cells — called beta cells — that’s the root cause of type 1 diabetes.
People with this condition often develop serious complications such as as heart disease, stroke, kidney failure, blindness, and premature death. To survive, people with Type 1 diabetes must have insulin delivered by injection or pump. Not to be confused with Type 2, it accounts for approximately 5% of all diagnosed cases of diabetes and affects about 3 million Americans.
Ultimately, these new lab-grown cells could be transplanted into diabetes patients, allowing them to create insulin naturally.
As Melton explains in Harvard Magazine, these cells, “read the amount of sugar in the blood, and then secrete just the right amount insulin in a way that is so exquisitely accurate that I don’t believe it will ever be reproduced by people injecting insulin or by a pump injecting that insulin.”
More from Harvard Magazine:
The cells share key traits and markers characteristic of beta cells with those from healthy individuals, including the packaging of the insulin they secrete in granules. In diabetic mice, they cure diabetes right away, in fewer than 10 days…
…But the how of creating beta cells from embryonic stem (ES) cells—directing the process of differentiation in either embryonic stem cells or induced pluripotent stem cells (derived from adult cells) to make any specific cell type, for that matter—has eluded scientists for more than a decade. Recapitulating the normal development program in a petri dish has proven extremely complicated, because a protein signal that has a certain effect at one stage of the process—guiding an ES cell to become, for example, one of the embryonic “germ layers” such as endoderm (from which the gut, liver, and pancreas develop)—might have an entirely different effect at a later stage, or in a higher concentration, or within a different environmental niche in the body.
The discovery reported today in Cell was thus not the result of serendipitous biological code-breaking, says Melton, but rather of “hard work.” “What we did to solve this problem is study all the genes that come on and go off during the normal development of a beta cell in mice and in frogs and in the human material that we could get access to. Once we knew which genes come on and go off, we then had to find a way to manipulate their activity…with inducing agents.” Melton and his team tested hundreds of combinations of small chemicals and growth factors before hitting on a six-step procedure in which two or three factors are added at each step, and in which the factor, its concentration, and the duration of its application all mattered.
The result was a scalable differentiation protocol that will be usable in industrial production of beta cells.
But as the Boston Globe reports:
Melton cautions that the work is still years from being tested in patients and many challenges, scientific and practical, remain. But he is gratified to have reached this point and even more motivated to continue, so as not to disappoint the millions of people who suffer from type 1 diabetes, which is usually diagnosed in children and young adults.
“We’re tired of curing mice,” Melton said in an interview. “Most patients are sick of hearing that something’s just around the corner; I’m sick of thinking things are just around the corner. But I do believe in the big picture.”
Melton hopes the cells could be ready to be tested in people in a few years. Already, cells are being transplanted into primates through a collaboration with a researcher in Chicago.
Melton’s work is expected to energize the diabetes research community.
It’s important to note that this discovery did not happen overnight. It arrived through the hard work of 50 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who have worked on the project over the last 15 years.
Much more about this remarkable breakthrough at Harvard Magazine and The Boston Globe.
Tags:
#the power of science #medicine #diabetes
Snake Poop and The Adaptive Ballast Hypothesis
by Andrew Durso
Most people probably spend as little time as possible thinking about poop, especially snake poop. Some animals produce enormous amounts of poop, like dairy cows. Others make lots of little poops – up to 50 a day in small birds.
In contrast, snakes don’t poop much at all. In fact, because they eat so infrequently, snakes probably poop the least often of almost any animal. Anyone who has kept a snake as a pet can tell you that a few days after they’re fed, most snakes tend to poop once (often in their water bowls, for some annoying reason), and they might poop again within a few more days.
Like bird poop, snake poop is made up of two parts – the brown stuff (the fecal fragment, aka the actual poop) and the white stuff (the uric acid fragment, aka the pee, in a solid form). Also like birds, most reptiles use uric acid rather than urea to excrete their excess nitrogen, which helps them conserve water.
You wouldn’t think there would be much that’s interesting about snake poop, but to a snake biologist everything about snakes is interesting. In 2002, Harvey Lillywhite, Pierre de Delva, and Brice Noonan published a chapter in the book Biology of the Vipers that detailed their studies on snake poop.
Their most amazing finding was that some snakes can go for a really, really long time without pooping. As in, over a year. It’s not because they’re constipated though – these long fecal retention periods have actually evolved for a purpose in snakes.
Here’s what happens: most snakes eat very large meals, and they eat them all in one piece. That means that when a snake eats a meal, its body mass can more than double all at once, and it can only digest that meal from the outside in, because it hasn’t chewed or cut it up into small pieces to increase its surface area. Even for the insane digestive tract of a snake, this is an incredible feat…
(read more: Life is Short, Snakes Are Long)
photos: A. Durso, Pedro Rodriguez, and Cater News Agency
Tags:
#snake #poop #the more you know #you know how pretty much every kid goes through an -ology phase? #mine was herpetology #so my inner nine-year-old is pretty happy right now #(though the later versions of me find it a bad sign that this guy thinks it’s okay to link to *Dr. Oz* as a reputable source) #(but you can’t have everything) #(and he did pick a very nice blog title)
I hear people say “oh my god I hate people” all the time without backlash. everyone knows they don’t hate every single individual in humanity. they have friends and family they love and hang out with. they simply hate the greedy, corrupted, oppressive nature of some human beings.
but the minute we say something about white people or men, no one seems to understand that it’s the same concept.
How does that saying go? “The line between good and evil runs through every human heart”? Everyone is worthy of love, and everyone is worthy of hatred. No exceptions.
When I say I hate everyone (which, admittedly, I generally don’t do out loud, as it’s rather rude), I mean literally everyone. I mean my psychological barriers preventing me from contemplating why I ought to hate everyone have failed.
Said barriers are currently only in the alpha stage of development, and fail frequently: about 2 – 5 times a month, for about half an hour at a time. I’m working on it, though. I hope that one day, I’ll be able to repress my misanthropy as thoroughly as I do my mortality.
(I note that the anti-mortality barriers were a huge project, taking something like 2 – 3 years to develop to a point strong enough that I could talk about it without really thinking about it. I was around age 7 when I started it, so it was a big chunk of my total lifespan at that point. I don’t expect the anti-misanthropy barriers will be any easier, both in terms of how long it takes and in terms of the amount of pain suffered in the process.)
Tags:
#Misanthropes Anonymous #’everyone knows’ my foot
The party is staring down a mine shaft, over which is suspended a winch with a large metal container hanging from it.
Bard: So is this … an orelevator?
DM: … do we need to make saving throws? A pun that bad is an attack, right?
Tags:
#puns
the autumnal colour spectrum
(photos by rob herr, richard shilling, ryan connors, evie jaye, mr. dale)
Tags:
#autumn #pretty things #colourful
Designer Goula Figeura’s Orwell day bed lets you easily shut yourself off from the outside world with its light and noise-cancelling curtains.
I have a MIGHTY NEED.
Tags:
#interesting #love the decor fandom
Dear Tumblr users:
There’s a cultural thing on Tumblr that if people changed just a little, would be a big accessibility win. You know the technique of linking to the source of content with just a linked “X”, eg: [x], or numbers, eg 1, 2, and 3? Please don’t do this.
That tiny “X” makes a tiny, tiny target. It’s hard to see if you have vision impairments or other visual processing issues. It’s hard to navigate to with a mouse for users with mobility issues, and a nearly impossible target for many people with small touch screens. For screen reader users, it simply announces as “link: X” and can be very difficult to understand out of context. For people with cognitive processing issues, it’s a link that tells the user nothing about its destination.
And most of these limitations can also be problems for able-bodied people!
Instead, using meaningful link text. Some examples might be
For a video, the title of the video is a pretty good choice, eg “How Blind People Use Twitter & You Tube on the iPhone 4S”. Or “Source”, or “source at YouTube”, or “video source”.
It’s a little thing which can be hugely beneficial to people with disabilities. Thanks, and I hope you consider changing how you link.
(Please reblog, too!)
Tags:
#PSA
Malkavian 1: But what if that’s what the spirits do, they manifest as your greatest fear.
Malkavian 2: Just don’t tell them what your greatest fear is.
Ventrue: [loudly, addressing the spirits] Mine’s money!
hey just a warning for xkit users on chrome, if you get the little red RESET warning, don’t click it. there is nothing wrong with it but upon resetting xkit will not be able to install anymore. the newest chrome update did something to the xkit guy’s coding or servers or something and he can’t quite figure out how to fix it, so don’t reset your xkit. i unfortunately learned this the hard way.
Man, this came too late for me. But other people in my dash, be warned!
Tags:
#XKit #signal boost #I use Firefox #but maybe this will help someone else
