Hibernation Biology & Applications In Human Health & Resilience — Dr. Dana K. Merriman, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor Emerita of Biology; Director of the Squirrel Colony, UW-Oshkosh.
Dr. Dana K. Merriman Ph.D. (www.uwosh.edu/facstaff/merriman/VaughanHome), is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Biology, and Director of the Squirrel Colony, at University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, and Adjunct Professor of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences, Medical College of Wisconsin.
With her BA in Biological Science and her PhD in Physiology and Cell Biology, both from University of California-Santa Barbara, as well as having spent time as a Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Utah Health Sciences Center, a core focus of Dr. Merriman’s laboratory research over the years has been the development of a captive breeding colony of the 13-lined ground squirrels.
Intel ((INTC) — Get Intel Corporation Report ) is the bearer of additional bad news.
The chip giant will give an extra blow to consumers and businesses concerned about the health of the economy. For several weeks in fact, consumers have seen their bills for groceries and other products increase. The price of gasoline at the pump has jumped when they go to fill up their car.
And the situation is not getting any better since inflation remains at its highest for forty years, which should push the Federal Reserve to be even more aggressive in raising rates. However, economists have already warned that this monetary policy would plunge the economy into recession.
A new study has identified neuroplastic changes in brain structure that accompany attention bias modification training in highly anxious individuals. The findings, which appear in the journal Biological Psychology, shed light on the mechanisms underlying the efficacy of the treatment.
Research has demonstrated that the brain prioritizes threating information over non-threatening information. But in highly anxious individuals, this attentional bias can become exaggerated and detrimental. The authors of the new study sought to better understand the changes in brain structure that result from attention bias modification, an intervention that seeks to systematically train attention away from threatening stimuli and toward neutral stimuli.
“Our lab has had a longstanding interest in understanding the behavioral and neural mechanisms of affective attention and attentional bias to affective information,” said study authors Josh Carlson and Lin Fang of the Cognitive x Affective Behavior & Integrated Neuroscience (CABIN) Lab at Northern Michigan University.
Research that was recently published in Scientific Reports presents the first human genome that has been successfully sequenced from a person who passed away in Pompeii, Italy, after Mount Vesuvius’ explosion in the year 79 CE. Only little segments of mitochondrial DNA
DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is a molecule composed of two long strands of nucleotides that coil around each other to form a double helix. It is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms that carries genetic instructions for development, functioning, growth, and reproduction. Nearly every cell in a person’s body has the same DNA. Most DNA is located in the cell nucleus (where it is called nuclear DNA), but a small amount of DNA can also be found in the mitochondria (where it is called mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA).
In the 2016 sci-fi movie “Arrival,” a linguist and a theoretical physicist race against time to communicate with endangered extraterrestrial heptapods wishing to share their wisdom and technologies with the human race so it will survive and one day return the favor.
At the University of California, Berkeley, a real and more down-to-earth mission to decode an unknown form of communication is underway. Linguist Gasper Begus and computer scientist Shafi Goldwasser are part of an international team of researchers attempting interspecies communication with sperm whales by deciphering their deafening, 200-plus decibel clicking sounds, or codas.
They are among the key members of the Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI), a newly launched, five-year multidisciplinary project aimed at cracking sperm whales’ Morse code-like communications off the Caribbean island of Dominica, to gain a deeper knowledge of the ocean’s brainiest predators and to preserve their habitat from further human disruption.
A team of researchers from IBM Research Europe, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela and the University of Regensburg has changed the bonds between the atoms in a single molecule for the first time. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their method and possible uses for it. Igor Alabugin and Chaowei Hu, have published a Perspective piece in the same journal issue outlining the work done by the team.
The current method for creating complex molecules or molecular devices, as Alagugin and Chaowei note, is generally quite challenging—they liken it to dumping a box of Legos in a washing machine and hoping that some useful connections are made. In this new effort, the research team has made such work considerably easier by using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to break the bonds in a molecule and then to customize the molecule by creating new bonds—a chemistry first.
The work by the team involved placing a sample material into a scanning tunneling microscope and then using a very tiny amount of electricity to break specific bonds. More specifically, they began by pulling four chlorine atoms from the core of a tetracyclic to use as their starting molecule. They then moved the tip of the STM to a C-CI bond and then broke the bond with a jolt of electricity. Doing so to the other C-CI and C-C pairs resulted in the formation of a diradical, which left six electrons free for use in forming other bonds. In one test of creating a new molecule, the team then used the free electrons (and a dose of high voltage) to form diagonal C-C bonds, resulting in the creation of a bent alkyne. In another example, they applied a dose of low voltage to create a cyclobutadiene ring.
