They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence … they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.
Drug addicts’brain reward circuits often exhibit dulled responses, leading the addicts to seek more of the addictive substance to get their fix. Work in rats indicates that fatty foods may trigger similar responses. Paul Johnson and Paul Kenny at the Scripps Research Institute-Scripps Florida in Jupiter fed rats a high-fat diet, including bacon and sausages, and measured their responsiveness to reward. Animals given prolonged access to the fatty foods needed more stimulation than normal rats to reach a certain reward threshold over time, and gained more weight. Even when the rats were conditioned to associate a light signal with an electric shock to the foot, those with extended access to the high-fat diet continued to eat despite seeing the light, indicating the onset of compulsive-eating behaviour. When the researchers blocked the expression of a dopamine receptor that is downregulated in human drug addicts, rats consuming the rich diet became compulsive eaters more rapidly.
JUNK-FOOD JUNKIES - Nature 1 April 2010
biology is alive
This excellent video made at the Tokyo Institute of Technology illustrates how ATP synthase works. It is not an exaggeration to call this a machine, and to say it powers all life as we know it. (You don’t have to worry about the details—just watch it turn.)
Not to put to fine a point on it, but many members of the Clear Science staff find this to be one of the most astonishing, humbling facts in all of science.
Microarrays, sometimes called gene chips, provide snapshots of all the genes that are active in a cell at a particular time. Via.
http://www.johnkyrk.com/cellmembrane.html
«His love of games has served him well when deciphering the flood of data spilling out of the BGI’s sequencers wvery day. But “science is more satisfying than video games”, he says. “There’is more passion”.»
The Sequence Factory - 4 March 2010 Nature
The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living.
— Jules Henri Poincaré (via scienceisbeauty)
proofmathisbeautiful: scienceisbeauty:
Drosophila gene expression data exploration and visualization (link)
