09/17/15 // Mind Mapping For An Overwhelming Genetics Section. Sorry I Haven’t Been Super Active —

so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god

Finished the Aeneid and I loved it. Can't wait to start Dante's Inferno

honestly i know its cool to stay up late, but sleep is so incredibly important to learning and understanding concepts. when we are awake, our brain creates toxins which make it harder to think throughout the day. when we sleep, the brain can rest and remove these toxins, literately making us smarter.  get some sleep guys.

Habits of successful students

Discipline: “discipline is doing what needs to be done, even when you don’t want to”, which means that you have to force yourself to start doing things. 

Concentration: when you make a real effort in your work (study, homeworks etc…) you will be more likely to actually focus, understand and learn. 

Organization: always set tasks and goals and organize a study-schedule. Maybe you don’t really want to plan all the week, but if you just wake up and open your agenda/bullet journal/iphone calendar and write down all the things you have to do, setting due dates and deadlines, you’ll feel more conscious and encouraged to stay on track. 

Tasks-splitting: sometimes, you write down your tasks. Some of these tasks may be very hard and complicated, and it will take a long long time to complete them. So, you can split them in smaller tasks, so you will feel satisfied after a shorter period of time, instead of studying for hours and still seeing that chapter undone on your study-schedule. 

Watch the sunrise: when I wake up late, I feel like I don’t have enought time to do my work and lose my motivation. I literally panic and then I think “whatever, I could not complete all the things anyway”. So, if you wake up earlier you will feel more positive and  controlled. 

Smart reading: try not to read your textbook just like a newspaper. For every paragraph you read, try to underline and write down key words and then your question about that subject. Literally, turn your textbook into questions. If you write down question - particularly why…? - and think about the answer, you will be more likely to remember that stuff later. 

Healthy lifestile: if you don’t drink enough water in the morning, you will be more likely to have a decrease of concentration in the afternoon/evening, so: stay hydrated. Try also to have some snaks every one-two hours: feed your brain. 

I feel like a lot of people don’t want to ask questions they have about gender/sexuality to LGBT people because they don’t want to offend them because we talk about cishet people asking stupid or intrusive questions a lot

But actually when you’re questioning it’s really helpful to be able to ask some ‘stupid’ questions although you’re too afraid to

So can y'all LGBTQIA+ people reblog this if you’re totally fine with people asking questions about your gender/sexuality, as long as they do so respectfully

you can like both humanities and STEM.

you don’t have to “pick a side” and completely discard the other field after choosing your major.

you can like both science and art, and none is better than the other.

Free Tarot amd Rune Readings

Hello! I've been wanting more experience in reading tarot and runes so I decided to open up tarot readings for free! Please message me if you're interested and I'll get back to you asap

I have 2 decks

Throth tarot deck and wild and unknown tarot deck

I only have 1 set of runes

Please let me know if you're interested! Love and light

Study identifies new target to preserve nerve function

Scientists in the Vollum Institute at OHSU have identified an enzyme that plays a crucial role in the degeneration of axons, the threadlike portions of a nerve cell that transmit signals within the nervous system. Axon loss occurs in all neurodegenerative diseases, so this discovery could open new pathways to treating or preventing a wide array of brain diseases.

The research team discovered a new role of the enzyme Axundead - or Axed - in promoting the self-destruction of axons. They found that when Axed function was blocked, injured axons not only maintained their integrity but remained capable of transmitting signals within the brain’s complex circuitry for weeks. Their research was published July 5 in the journal Neuron.

“If you target this pathway, you have a really good chance of preserving the functional aspects of neurons after a variety of types of trauma or injury,” said senior author Marc Freeman, Ph.D., director of the Vollum Institute at OHSU. “It’s a very attractive therapeutic target.”

Freeman conducted the work in the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He has since been recruited to head the Vollum Institute, which conducts cutting-edge basic research into how the nervous system works at a molecular level.

Severing axons, or axotomy, is a simple way to study the molecular basis of neurodegeneration as it leads to the activation of explosive axonal degeneration. In the laboratory, researchers using this technique can identify pro-degenerative genes with great specificity, especially when using sophisticated genetic approaches in the fruit fly Drosophila, Freeman’s primary research model organism. Drosophila shares these same pathways with humans. Previous work by Freeman’s lab identified another enzyme, a gene called SARM, which was the first shown to activate a process that causes axons to disintegrate when damaged.

In the current study, Freeman and colleagues identified Axed, showed that it functions downstream of SARM to execute axonal degeneration, and, surprisingly, that the protection afforded by blocking Axed was even stronger than SARM.

“There was really nothing we could do to kill axons where Axed function was blocked,” Freeman said.

From an evolutionary perspective, Freeman said SARM and Axed function are likely important in the peripheral nervous system after injury because programmed axon death allows for efficient packaging of damaged cellular materials for removal by immune cells. This process thereby clears the pathway for new neuronal processes to regrow, reinnervate tissues, and recover function.

From a therapeutic perspective, the goal of the work is to understand at the molecular level how axons degenerate, and block those pathways in patients to preserve nervous system function. In many nervous system injuries axons are not severed but become stretched or crushed, which activates the SARM-dependent death program and drives axon loss. In those cases, it’s imperative to block SARM and Axed signaling to preserve axon integrity, and in turn neuronal function. At the same time, Freeman and others have shown that SARM-dependent signaling pathways also drive axon loss in neurodegenerative conditions including glaucoma, traumatic brain injury and peripheral neuropathy. This suggests the notion of an ancient and conserved axon death signaling pathway that is widely activated to drive axon loss. Since axon loss is a universal feature of neurodegenerative diseases, it seems likely that blocking this pathway could have enormous therapeutic benefit.

“If we can find ways to block it, maybe we can preserve function in a wide array of patients who have lost axons through neurodegenerative diseases or other neural trauma,” Freeman said.