sciencenote:

When the c-Maf protein malfunctions, eye cataracts result. The same protein is crucial for vibration-detecting Pacinian corpuscles (shown surrounding a mouse leg bone), which help human palms and fingertips sense high-frequency vibrations.

When it comes to feeling good vibrations, the eyes have it. Experiments in mice and humans show that a protein important for eye development also plays a role in sensing vibrations. An international team has found that mice lacking a protein called c-Maf have deformed Pacinian corpuscles (shown here in a mouse’s leg), the vibration-detectors that surround mouse bones. People have Pacinian corpuscles in their palms and fingertips. When the researchers tested four people with eye cataracts due to malfunctioning c-Maf, those individuals had a hard time detecting high-frequency vibrations, the scientists report online February 16 in Science.

fyeahchemistry:

Your life has only just begun.

scientistintraining:

Treponema pallidum, the bacterium that causes syphilis.

Studying for my exam tomorrow, Syphilis, Chlamydia, Lyme Disease, Leptospirosis, Relapsing Fever and Mycoplasma, whew!

scientistintraining:

SEM image of Mycoplasma. (Color enhanced scanning electron microscope (SEM) image of Mycoplasma.)

Photo by  Don W. Fawcett 

scientistintraining:

Scanning electron micrograph of a number of Leptospira sp. bacteria atop a 0.1 µm polycarbonate filter

soupsoup:

Aurora Borealis Live Camera from Sweden

(via jtotheizzoe)

scienceisbeauty:

Optical section series through adjacent protoplasmic astrocytes in rat hippocampal area CA1 intracellulaly injected Lucifer Yellow (green) and Alexa 568 (red) respectively, imaged with confocal microscopy.

Source: Cell Centered Database, UC San Diego

melisaki:

Torn Leaf

photo by Brett Weston; Hawaii Portfolio, 1978

(via freshphotons)

geneticist:

A worker at Dalian Hoffen Bio-Technique Company in northern China pieces together plastinated human parts (yes, made from the bodies of the unclaimed deceased)
The completed piece will be put on exhibit for people around the world to see. Read more

jtotheizzoe:

The Forgetting Pill: Can We Erase Painful Memories?

If you could take a pill that would erase any memory, would you take it? Traumatic memories can be painful, debilitating baggage, persisting for decades and often difficult to control. Previous therapies involved discussing traumatic memories in detail, but new models of the elastic and networked basis of memory have demonstrated that this isn’t effective. Jonah Lehrer writes in Wired:

Since the time of the ancient Greeks, people have imagined memories to be a stable form of information that persists reliably. The metaphors for this persistence have changed over time—Plato compared our recollections to impressions in a wax tablet, and the idea of a biological hard drive is popular today—but the basic model has not. Once a memory is formed, we assume that it will stay the same. This, in fact, is why we trust our recollections. They feel like indelible portraits of the past.

None of this is true. In the past decade, scientists have come to realize that our memories are not inert packets of data and they don’t remain constant. Even though every memory feels like an honest representation, that sense of authenticity is the biggest lie of all.

However, a “memory” is not a “thing”, in the usual sense of the word. It is an experience, in our brain, that we replay.

We have new understanding that the formation of memories is utterly dependent on biological processes, on proteins that help write new connections in our neural network. When we “re-fire” this network, we “recall” a memory. What if we could block the proteins that write the connections? Could we truly forget?

New research is getting close to just that. In rats, drugs can block the function of a key protein (PKMzeta) involved in strengthening memory synapses. The effect is preventing experiences from being reinforced. In a sense, one can forget that small neural web, and the memory that it encodes.

When we begin to view memory as relative, as dependent on a constant flux of neural networks, it calls into question what is “true”. And the ethics of taking a “forgetting” pill are just as murky. It turns out that our assumption that we can’t choose what to remember or forget is wrong, and soon we might have the power to make that choice. Would you?

For more, check out Jonah Lehrer’s full article, and this series on PKMzeta from Ed Yong. 

(via Wired Magazine, image by Dwight Eschliman)