Over the past month or so I've been watching an assortment of geology professors use the ongoing subsurface magma activity around Grindavík, Iceland, as a hook for talking about volcanism in general. Today, a fissure finally popped open.

Live from Iceland has some cameras scattered around the area. This one has the best view. (Note that someone is actively managing the cameras, so they'll zoom and pan from time to time.) I've got the feed set to full screen on my laptop because it's just so pretty.


tl;dr: Lava! Get it while it's hot!
The Guardian reports that Staphylococcus aureus, already associated with and predispositive towards eczema development, makes a protein that interacts directly with the nerves that produce/transmit itching sensations.
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Reuters reports that as of March 31st, 2022, all Russian military forces have left the vicinity of the Chernobyl exclusion zone and its satellite town of Slavutych (where the various monitoring, safety, & support staff live).

The Guardian confirms this, and adds that the International Atomic Energy Agency has a specific timeline for having a support mission on the ground at Chernobyl, "within a few days".

Cue a medium-sized sigh of relief.
We just might know how antidepressants work, now. As it turns out, both SSRIs and ketamine bind to a receptor for Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor, TrkB (free article). If you just want the high points, there's a graphical abstract on the front page of the PDF version.

Now, this right here? This made my day. :D



It also offers some new leads to understanding why entire categories of antidepressants don't work for some people. Subtle differences among TrkB alleles and expression frequencies might have big effects on what fits into that molecular pocket and how strong an effect it has. After all, we already know that one particular allele seems to confer a 2.2x risk of suicide attempts in depressed people.

On a more basic research level, we might also be able to develop model animals with cued brain-only overexpression of TrkB (where a gene promoter is added, and operates IFF some exogenous chemical cue is present) to determine what effects it has, and whether it's worthwhile to consider tinkering with the expression rate as a treatment method.
Original source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/28/magazine/covid-smell-science.html

tl;dr: Smell is a dominant sense, and invisible in its dominance, much like proprioception.

“People are unaware smell is important until they lose it. And then they’re terrified.”
- Noam Sobel, Weizmann Institute of Science


Full text, inside. )
This is far too important a subject to languish behind a paywall. Original article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/02/health/coronavirus-smell-taste.html

tl;dr: Scent is intimately tied to physical and emotional well-being. If you can't smell sulfur dioxide, you can't tell that the kitchen is filling with gas from the oven or stove. If you can't smell food, you're at a real loss for determining whether it's gone off, and even when nothing's wrong with it, most people say that the pleasure of eating is gone. And people with damage to their sense of smell tend to become socially isolated--because face-to-face interactions are no longer enjoyable.


Full text inside. )


Addendum:
My immediate thought after reading this was, 'What if the Western plague of anomie is down to our cultures' insistence that smelling like oneself is unacceptable?' It's such a simple, pervasive thing. If scent is up there with touch in its ability to create feelings of interpersonal connection and warmth, then what effect does its absence have on political polarization? On a societies' degree of individualism vs. collectivism? On America's basic civil society, which has been crumbling for generations?
403: This is your brane on string theory. (String Theory)
( Jul. 28th, 2015 12:41 am)
From Mother Jones: Bark beetles are decimating our [conifer] forests. Maybe we should let them. (tl;dr - Surviving trees have superior tolerance of hot weather. Lots of trees will die, but the forests live on.)

Science surprise: Constrictor snakes don't kill by suffocation.

A macroscopic quantum phenomenon has been observed in water ice, at around 20 Kelvins.


On the more human-related end of things:

A great deal of feminist Win is taking place in this MetaFilter thread. The original article is interesting, but the MeFi discussion is where things are happening. If you just want the high points, people have been collecting their favorite quotes in the comments over [livejournal.com profile] siderea way.

The NYTimes has another update in its "Outlaw Ocean" series: 'Sea Slaves': The human misery that feeds pets and livestock

And I've recently run across a thoughtful article from 2011 titled Clinical Despair: Science, Psychotherapy and Spirituality in the Treatment of Depression, which is just what it says on the tin.
403: (The Human Condition)
( Jul. 14th, 2015 08:09 am)
Some Cambrian-era fossil comb jellies had skeletons. (Note that comb jellies are not actual jellyfish. Instead they're the oldest/most basal animal clade. True jellies are relative newcomers.)
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Song et al. "Regeneration and experimental orthotopic transplantation of a bioengineered kidney", Nature Medicine (2013)

Abstract:
Approximately 100,000 individuals in the United States currently await kidney transplantation, and 400,000 individuals live with end-stage kidney disease requiring hemodialysis. The creation of a transplantable graft to permanently replace kidney function would address donor organ shortage and the morbidity associated with immunosuppression. Such a bioengineered graft must have the kidney's architecture and function and permit perfusion, filtration, secretion, absorption and drainage of urine. We decellularized rat, porcine and human kidneys by detergent perfusion, yielding acellular scaffolds with vascular, cortical and medullary architecture, a collecting system and ureters. To regenerate functional tissue, we seeded rat kidney scaffolds with epithelial and endothelial cells and perfused these cell-seeded constructs in a whole-organ bioreactor. The resulting grafts produced rudimentary urine in vitro when perfused through their intrinsic vascular bed. When transplanted in an orthotopic position in rat, the grafts were perfused by the recipient's circulation and produced urine through the ureteral conduit in vivo.
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403: This is your brane on string theory. (String Theory)
( May. 1st, 2012 09:25 pm)
I have a presentation and poster session a week from today, on the behavior of Arabidopsis thaliana LBD16 mutants under phosphate starvation. This afternoon, I finished the last of the main-inquiry data gathering. Now I have to make it mean something.

Probable radio silence ahead, not that that's any different from usual.
403: Listen to the song of the paper cranes... (Cranesong)
( Jan. 15th, 2012 02:35 pm)
How to Read a Scientific Paper. I wish more people knew how to do this.
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Subject line of an e-mail I just recieved: "Over 1,000 New Moronic Acids from Alfa Aesar".

Sadly, the body of the message is all about boronic acids, which are far more mundane.


(In other news, I'm allllllllmost done with the semester. Yay!)


ETA: 5/19/11, 0:29 - First off I am now DONE! with the semester. Second, the real topic of this post gets better. Moronic acid turns out to be a real substance.
403: Igor (Igor)
( Apr. 14th, 2011 01:00 pm)
I am currently in the same room with a scanning-tunnelling electron microscope. Its carrying case is the size of a large briefcase. So far, we're not being allowed to play with it.


Inspired by the Institute For Figuring. This is what you get when you start with a round of six chain stitches, and double each stitch for six full rounds.
The experiment: Collect fruit scraps (apple cores, lemon peels, the white bits of a watermelon, etc.) in the 'fridge for whatever length of time is convenient. Add to a solution of 1/4 cup honey per liter of water, in a wide-neck bottle or jar. Cover with a cloth held on by a rubber band, and leave in a cool, dry place for a week. Next week, I'll find out whether watermelon rind makes a decent vinegar.

The science: The first and obvious step of any sugary solution left at room temperature is that wild yeasts will ferment the sugar into alcohol. Once there's alcohol in solution, the naturally occurring acetic acid bacteria will ferment that into vinegar, quickly lowering the pH below that favored by the various species of microbes and fungi that cause spoilage. (If the culture contains Acetobacter xylinium or similar, they'll form a harmless mat that floats at the top of the jar which is known as "mother of vinegar".)
Last week I assembled some trellising to hide the neighbor's ugly garage wall, and give the pitiful-looking grapevine someplace to grow. It looks good, but the cheap wood of the trellis is starting to bend under its own weight already.

Monday, my housemates and I hauled a massive desk bequeathed to us by the previous owners upstairs for my use. Because it's large, red (cherry stain, if not actual cherry wood), and evil to move in any way at all, we've named it "The Balrog". In retrospect, we probably should've waited for the professional movers, but the three of us got ambitious. We also succeeded with only a minor ding to the stairwell, which speaks for itself.

My own clumsiness and some misfortune in getting the Balrog into position has left a wide, shallow scrape on the wood floor (appears to be finish damage only). While I'm fixing it, I figure I may as well fill in and finish over the 1/8" deep, 1/8" wide cross-grain gouges left by the previous owners. (I can't figure out what they did to make that shape. Fit their kids for iceskates indoors, maybe?) It will be impossible to hide that it's a patch job, but that's preferable to having the unsanded wood-splinters hanging out near my bare feet.

Yesterday, I did battle with the community college bureaucracy in order to establish my student status. A rematch to determine my tuition residency is in the works, but it's waiting on a utility bill so that I can prove I'm planning to stay (in the mean time, they're charging me the out-of-state rate, and the understaffed FinAid office will eventually get around to reimbursing me). It's worth noting that I ache more after standing in lines for 5h than I did after moving extremely heavy furniture the day before.

In this morning's bout of insomnia, I've been reading about the origins of number representation. The results are pretty cool, and I'm not going to spoil the suspense for you. Read it yourself - I'm going to try to sleep some more.
403: Igor (Igor)
( Aug. 9th, 2010 08:52 am)
Vinay Deolalikar of HP Labs, who's done previous work in the area, has published a proof that P ≠ NP. It will take a few days for other mathematicians to check his work for mistakes. I wish I knew enough math to understand the proof myself.
You really can be bored to death, accoring to researchers from University College, London, but it's a slow and tedious process.

(Abstract here. I have a PDF of the full text, if anyone's interested.)
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