Serious Business
Superhydrophobic surfaces resist wetting from water, but it turns out they can also trigger interesting behaviors in the tiny droplets condensing on the surface. High-speed video reveals that when two condensate droplets coalesce, the energy released by surface tension causes the new droplet to jump off the surface. The phenomenon is the same as one observed in some types of mushroom—when a condensate droplet touches a wetted spore, the spore is ejected from the mushroom. (Video credit: J Boreyko)
(Source: pratt.duke.edu)
By Murtaza Haider, Ph.D. Associate Dean of research and graduate programs at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University in Toronto.
——
Several policy-makers, politicians, and development professionals in the west believe that the economic survival of Pakistan rests on handouts…
(Source: umalik)
Vesicles bursting out of a synapse.
I’m surprised to see so many little spheres. It looks like quite a few vesicles are bursting out around the edges, too.
(via scinerds)
A study in the journal mBio, published by the American Society for Microbiology, shows how an antibiotic-susceptible staph germ passed from humans into pigs, where it became resistant to the antibiotics tetracycline and methicillin. And then the antibiotic-resistant staph learned to jump back into humans.
“It’s like watching the birth of a superbug,” says Lance Price of the Translational Genomics Research Institute, or TGen, in Flagstaff, Ariz.
Quoting the study directly:
Modern food animal production is characterized by densely concentrated animals and routine antibiotic use, which may facilitate the emergence of novel antibiotic-resistant zoonotic pathogens. Our findings strongly support the idea that livestock-associated MRSA CC398 (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus clonal complex 398) originated as MSSA (methicillin-susceptible S. aureus) in humans. The jump of CC398 from humans to livestock was accompanied by the loss of phage-carried human virulence genes, which likely attenuated its zoonotic (tendency for infectious diseases to transfer from animal to human, or vice versa) potential, but it was also accompanied by the acquisition of tetracycline and methicillin resistance. Our findings exemplify a bidirectional zoonotic exchange and underscore the potential public health risks of widespread antibiotic use in food animal production.
Note that this paper is open source. If you are a professional and you understand this paper, I suggest that you go and read it to see for yourself.
Relevant background information:
Most antibiotics sold in the U.S. (80%) go to animals, mostly in their feed, where they act as a growth promoter and damp down infection outbreaks in large feedlots.
Many livestock groups say there’s no evidence that using antibiotics in livestock feed creates a human health problem.
“Most informed scientists and public health professionals acknowledge that the problem of antibiotic resistance in humans is overwhelmingly an issue related to human antibiotic use,” the American Meat Institute says.
The new report adds fuel to the long-running debate about antibiotic use for livestock, and the government’s responsibility to regulate it. In December, the FDA withdrew a 1977 proposal to remove approvals for two antibiotics, penicillins and tetracyclines, used in livestock and poultry feed. It said it would focus instead on “voluntary reform” by the meat industry to limit use.
Health experts in Portugal said Friday (May 28, 2011) that Portugal’s decision 10 years ago to decriminalise drug use and treat addicts rather than punishing them is an experiment that has worked.
“There is no doubt that the phenomenon of addiction is in decline in Portugal,” said Joao Goulao, President of the Institute of Drugs and Drugs Addiction, a press conference to mark the 10th anniversary of the law.
The number of addicts considered “problematic” — those who repeatedly use “hard” drugs and intravenous users — had fallen by half since the early 1990s, when the figure was estimated at around 100,000 people, Goulao said.
Art of hearts
Today is Valentine’s Day, a day to celebrate love, romance and, well, all that romantic stuff. At least that’s the idea. For some, alas, Valentine’s is as bittersweet as the box of chocolates that never arrives. It’s a time instead to recollect lost loves – and maybe eat a pint of Haagen Daz chocolate ice cream.
Or not. A pint of HD chocolate contains 1,080 calories and 72 grams of fat, 44 of them the saturated kind. That level of consumption can lead to a different sort of heartache, maybe the kind represented by the lovely scanning electron micrograph above of a blood clot, taken by John Weisel at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
In this false color image, red blood cells are depicted in red, leukocytes (a kind of white blood cell involved in fighting infections) in green, platelet aggregates (cell fragments that form clots) are gray and the stringy stuff is fibrin, an insoluble protein that holds blood clots together.
Absence (of this mess) is what makes the heart grow fonder. Or at least healthier.
How much energy whether electric, coal, nuclear, or otherwise - is required for a 100 watt lightbulb to run for a year , 24 hours a day?
(via scinerds)
Anatomical position
In order to avoid confusion when describing the body, it is always described in the anatomical position. In the anatomical position, a person stands erect, legs together and arms by their sides, with their head, eyes, toes and palms of the hands…
(Source: anatomy.tv)
