A Note On Nuclear Fission

Figure 1. Bun (Lepus townsendii) approaching ideal bun form (ei. a perfect fluffy orb) over the course of 5.2 hours. Ambient temperature -6°C to -15°C.

The Field Museum’s Economic Botany collection contains everything from a seed bank (literally vials upon vials of organized seeds), to hats made out of various grasses and straw material, musical instruments and shoes made from certain trees and barks, stalks of wheat, cobs of corn, bags of tea, dyes, medicines. Some of the items are decades old, and a large portion date back to the 1893 World’s Fair, when the trade and sale of such products was essential to industry growth.

This is a collection about the relationship between people and plants, documenting our use and interactions with items we’ve grown and harvested. It’s botanical as much as it is anthropological: the variety of uses for plants that people have discovered and created over thousands of years is staggering and astounding. As we continue to move towards automated agriculture and become less removed from the direct sources for our food and raw materials, I am grateful and intrigued that we may look into a jar of cherry syrup from the 1890′s and gain a bit more knowledge about the way we used to live. 

Pictures: 

A jar of cherry syrup from Guyana, 1893

A variety of pasta products, presented by the National Macaroni Association, 1920′s

Tortillas from Mexico, 1901 

Sugars from Egypt, 1904 

Maize from Brazil, 1948-1949

See more about the Economic Botanical Collection on The Brain Scoop!

The First Pizza Joint

Antica Pizzeria Port'Alba, in Naples, Italy, is widely considered the world’s first pizzeria. It was first established in 1738 as a peddler’s stand. In 1830, it became a brick-and-mortar restaurant in the town center. Since its opening day, their ovens have been lined with lava rocks taken from nearby Mount Vesuvius.

reasons why i claim to learn latin:

it’s a beautiful language

its historical importance

the literature is brilliant and best enjoyed in its original language

reasons why i actually learn latin:

so when people ask me to say something in latin i can tell them a meme and claim it means something beautiful

so if i ever get a chance to go back in time, i can talk about dumb shit with people like cicero and mark antony

so i can communicate with my brethren, the demons from hell

. Photo by @d.arkhipov The tribe of Mundari people. Thousands of years they live on their land of South Sudan with theirs cows. All their life they move along the White Nile in search of new pastures and they have to defend the cows against other tribes with the arm. #wild #nature #sudan #cow #wildlife #animals #africa #tribe #people #igs_africa #wildeyesa #earthcapture #southsudan #earthofficial #awesomeearth https://www.instagram.com/p/B9MvKDDAcFU/?igshid=18u5b82hqa05l

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker

THIS BOOK is life changing. (Even Bill Gates thought so!) I learned so much, and not just scientific facts that satisfy my curiosity. My (seemingly defunct) sleep habits have been validated, and I’m now empowered with ways to drastically improve my physical, mental, and emotional health. Ever since finishing the book I’ve been enthusiastically telling others to please read it.

Some things I’ve personally learned:

Being a night owl, early bird, or somewhere in the middle is genetic. We literally can not change this “habit”, because it’s not a habit; it’s a biological function. About 40% of people are early birds, 30% are night owls, and 30% are in the middle. The theory as to why we’ve evolved this way is because as a social species, this natural ability to take turns keeping watch at night improves our survival as a whole. Thus we as a society need to rethink and rework the ways that our world favors early birds and shuns night owls.

All teenagers have a shift in circadian rhythm that is different than young children and adults. They literally can not naturally fall asleep until well past midnight, and thus should not be waken up until after their 8 hours of sleep. What parents–and society–expecting teens to go to bed by 10 pm and wake up by 6 or 7 am for school is like asking an adult to go to bed at 7 or 8 pm, and then wake up at 4 am. Horrible, right? And yes, that chronic sleep-deprivation does have real consequences, such as a link to increased physical and mental illness. 

The natural human sleep schedule is a continuous 7-8 hours at night, and a brief 30 - 60 min nap in the afternoon. Studies have shown that in cultures where this schedule has been suddenly disrupted (like a study in Greece), people with no history of cardiovascular disease suddenly showed a 37% increase in the chance of dying from heart disease (vs those who still maintained a mid-day napping schedule) over the 6-year study period. Yikes. 

Oh, btw, that whole observation in Western Europe about people sleeping in 2 segments in the night (and waking up in the middle to eat, socialize, etc) is not a biological thing, but rather, cultural. That is not how humans have evolved to sleep. 

I think we’re all kind of familiar with knowing that sleep is attached to remembering facts, but sleep is also necessary for learning new facts. Thus a good night’s rest is not just essential for doing well on tomorrow’s exam, but also for remembering tomorrow’s lecture in another class. To put it another way: you retain short-term memories in the hippocampus, but it has a storage limit (like a USB stick). Thus sleep helps move those memories into long-term storage so you can remember them, and by doing so, also frees up that space for new memories. 

Sleep is also essential for learning new motor skills. If you’re having trouble with say, playing a difficult piece on the piano, try again after a full night’s rest. When you’re sleeping, your brain is still actively working perfecting that sequence of piano keys you need to press. Thus the adage of “practice makes perfect” should be amended to “practice and sleep makes perfect”. 

Sleeping 6 hours/night for 10 days straight will cause a cognitive decline equivalent to staying up for 24 hours straight. And for those of us who keeps that exact same sleep schedule and think we’re “fine”, we really don’t realize how not fine we are because we think that’s our baseline normal. If you’ve ever wished to have more energy and be more productive, sleeping more may just be your magical wish-granting-genie.

Every hour in the US someone dies from a car accident caused by someone behind the wheel not getting enough sleep, due to the brain essentially “blacking out” to outside stimulus for a few seconds during a micro-sleep. As a perspective: a drunk driver is merely slow at reacting to say, slamming the brakes; a sleep-deprived driver going through a micro-sleep doesn’t react at all. 

Heart attacks across the US spike significantly the day following daylights savings when everyone loses an hour of sleep. The opposite is true when we gain back that hour in the fall: heart attacks drop the following day. And that’s just one piece of evidence that sleep supports a healthy heart. 

Sleeping 4 hours/night for just six nights increases your blood glucose levels so much you would be classified as pre-diabetic. 

It’s well known that alcohol can disrupt REM sleep. What was interesting is that alcohol-disrupted sleep can interfere with memory (and thus learning) even up to three nights later, even if you get 2 full nights of sleep before consuming alcohol. Therefore, if you have an exam on Monday, drinking on the Friday before will interfere with remembering everything you’ve studied the previous 2 days. 

Blue light, like those emitted from LED lightbulbs and the phone/tablet/computer screen you’re reading this from, stimulates our brain to wake-up and to stay awake. The evolutionary hypothesis for this is that we–and all land animals–evolved from marine life in the ocean, where the only visible light is blue, and therefore our brains recognize blue light as a cue to wake up. 

And that’s just a small fraction of the super interesting life-changing things I gained from this book. So if you found these tid-bits fascinating, I highly suggest checking it out!

New Evidence in Mice That Cocaine Makes Brain Cells Cannibalize Themselves

Working with mice, researchers at Johns Hopkins have contributed significant new evidence to support the idea that high doses of cocaine kill brain cells by triggering overactive autophagy, a process in which cells literally digest their own insides. Their results, moreover, bring with them a possible antidote, an experimental compound dubbed CGP3466B.

A summary of the study, which also found signs of autophagy in the brain cells of mice whose mothers received cocaine while pregnant, was published online the week of Jan. 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

(Image caption: A neural cell from a mouse brain shows much larger, more numerous vacuoles (orange) after 3 hours of treatment with cocaine than untreated cells. Credit: Prasun Guha, Maged Harraz, Solomon Snyder)

(Image caption: An untreated neural cell from a mouse brain shows no vacuoles. Credit: Prasun Guha, Maged Harraz, Solomon Snyder)

“We performed ‘autopsies’ to find out how cells die from high doses of cocaine,” says Solomon Snyder, M.D., professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “That information gave us immediate insight into how we might use a known compound to interfere with that process and prevent the damage.”

After discovering in 1990 that brain cells use the gas nitric oxide to communicate, Snyder and his research team have spent decades studying its impact. In 2013, the team found that nitric oxide is involved in cocaine-induced cell death through its interactions with GAPDH, an enzyme, but didn’t learn how precisely the cells were dying.

To find out, the research team examined nerve cells from mouse brains for clues. Snyder says cells, like whole animals, can die from extreme temperatures, toxins and physical trauma, but can also commit “suicide” in three ways that are chemically programmed and controlled by different proteins.

One such way is autophagy, a normal and much-needed cellular “cleanup process” that rids cells of debris that accumulates in membrane-enclosed vacuoles, or “bags” within the cell. These bags fuse with other bags, enzyme-rich lysosomes, which are filled with acids that degrade the contents of the vacuoles. Only when this process accelerates and spins out of control does it cause cell death, Snyder explains.

By measuring changes in the levels of proteins that control each cell death program and by observing the cells’ physical changes, the team saw clearly that cocaine causes neuronal cell death through out-of-control autophagy. That confirmed previous results from two other groups that found cocaine-induced autophagy in astrocytes and microglia, which are neuron support cells.

“A cell is like a household that is constantly generating trash,” says Prasun Guha, Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins and lead author of the paper. “Autophagy is the housekeeper that takes out the trash — it’s usually a good thing. But cocaine makes the housekeeper throw away really important things, like mitochondria, which produce energy for the cell.”

Because the team already knew that nitric oxide and GAPDH were involved in the process, they tested the ability of the compound CGP3466B, known to disrupt nitric oxide/GAPDH interactions, to halt cocaine-induced autophagy. They also tested other chemicals known to prevent the other two forms of cellular suicide, but only CGP3466B protected mouse nerve cells in the brain from death by cocaine.

According to previous research from the same team, CGP3466B was also able to rescue the brain cells of live mice from the deadly effects of cocaine, but they had not connected the phenomenon to autophagy. When the scientists recently gave mice a single dose of cocaine and looked for signs of autophagy in their brain cells, they detected autophagy-associated proteins and changes in vacuoles in adults and in mouse pups whose mothers had received cocaine while pregnant.

“Since cocaine works exclusively to modulate autophagy versus other cell death programs, there’s a better chance that we can develop new targeted therapeutics to suppress its toxicity,” says Maged M. Harraz, Ph.D., a research associate at Johns Hopkins and lead co-author of the paper.

Snyder says the team hopes its work will eventually lead to treatments that protect adults and infants from the devastating effects of cocaine on the brain. Since CGP3466B has already been tested in phase II clinical trials to (unsuccessfully) treat Parkinson’s disease and ALS, it is known to be safe for humans, but the researchers caution that many more years of studies are needed to definitively show whether it is effective for preventing cocaine damage, first in mice, then in humans. They also want to create and test derivatives of CGP3466B to learn more about cocaine-induced autophagy and see if cocaine is killing any cells outside the brain.

6 TED-Ed lessons to watch on International Women’s Day

Happy International Women’s Day! Here’s a list of TED-Ed Lessons to watch as you celebrate all of the world’s women, past and present.

The genius of Marie Curie: Marie Skłodowska Curie’s revolutionary research laid the groundwork for our understanding of physics and chemistry, blazing trails in oncology, technology, medicine, and nuclear physics, to name a few. But what did she actually do? Shohini Ghose expounds on some of Marie Skłodowska Curie’s most revolutionary discoveries.

The contributions of female explorers: During the Victorian Age, women were unlikely to become great explorers, but a few intelligent, gritty and brave women made major contributions to the study of previously little-understood territory. Courtney Stephens examines three women – Marianne North, Mary Kingsley and Alexandra David-Néel – who wouldn’t take no for an answer (and shows why we should be grateful that they didn’t).

Equality, sports and Title IX: In 1972, U.S. Congress passed Title IX, a law which prohibited discrimination against women in schools, colleges, and universities — including school-sponsored sports. Before this law, female athletes were few and far between, and funding was even scarcer. Erin Buzuvis and Kristine Newhall explore the significance and complexity of Title IX.

The true story of Sacajawea: In the early 19th century, a young Agaidika teenager named Sacajawea was enlisted by explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to aid her husband Toussaint Charbonneau as a guide to the Western United States. Karen Mensing debunks some of the myths that surround the familiar image of the heroic woman with a baby strapped to her back and a vast knowledge of the American wilderness.

Why should you read Virginia Woolf?: How best can we understand the internal experience of alienation? In both her essays and her fiction, Virginia Woolf shapes the slippery nature of subjective experience into words, while her characters frequently lead inner lives that are deeply at odds with their external existence. Iseult Gillespie helps make sense of these disparities to prepare you for the next time you read Virgina Woolf.

The pharaoh that wouldn’t be forgotten: Hatshepsut was a female pharaoh during the New Kingdom in Egypt. Twenty years after her death, somebody smashed her statues, took a chisel and attempted to erase the pharaoh’s name and image from history. But who did it? And why? Kate Green investigates Hatshepsut’s history for clues to this ancient puzzle. 

His story never changes. Ergo, lying