Hello!
Don’t know if anyone even still checks this site, but this article was really interesting! Among other things, it looks at breathing from a chemists point-of-view and considers the electron transfer.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/suffocating-cells-science/
For anyone interested….
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1LCxG8LxtUjNF9vSkptRGpsTDg/edit?usp=sharing
Let me know if the link works! OR, conversely, if it doesn’t so that I may try and fix it.
Happy summer to all!
I found this guide to healthy sleep from Harvard (which was admittedly sent to me after I told a friend I’d slept three hours in the past two nights. Apparently that’s “unhealthy” and “how people die young”). Anyway, I watched some of the videos and thought it was really interesting. At least it’s inspiring me to get some sleep tonight (my first night getting more than six hours of sleep in weeks!)
http://healthysleep.med.harvard.edu/healthy/
I hope you all have a great summer and are going to get tons of sleep!!!
I found this really cute model of DNA with Legos! I’m so completely uncreative when it comes to… really anything, so I always love seeing all the amazingly creative things that people do with science. And since we used models so much this semester (I can’t believe it’s over already!) I thought it would be fun to include something slightly different than the models we’ve used.
Sorry guys, I know this isn’t exactly common applications, but I came across this AMAZINGLY cool paper the other day on a new method called CRISPR. (Unfortunately they titled their paper “A Crisper Look at Genome Editing”. The title is ridiculously corny but the paper is incredible). It’s a novel idea that essentially edits the genome by essentially swapping out the defective gene for the normal gene using a guide mRNA. Normal gene therapies use viruses to introduce a gene. Normally these genes insert into oncogenic sites, and have shown a very high incidence of cancer. This therapy supposedly eliminates that altogether. I just thought it was really cool, check out the paper if you get a chance!
My friends made a rap about gestational diabetes and they were nice enough to offer to let me post it on the site! They also tell me they have another rap about grade deflation, which I’m hoping they’ll show me soon, but I figured this one was a little more relevant. Enjoy!
I thought I’d include this really pretty visualization of the phospholipid bilayer I found! 
It’s really doesn’t look much more complicated than the visualizations we usually see or draw for class! I probably should have realized how much more three-dimensional the bilayer was. Either way, I thought the picture was really cool!
There are dozens of sugar substitutes out for diabetics or people who just need to cut back on their sugar. I ran across a new one the other day called Stevia. Lately, it’s been used more often than traditional sugar substitutes, since saccharin, the usual sugar substitute, has been shown to be carcinogenic. The compound extracted from stevia is called steviol glycoside, which is about 300 times sweeter than table sugar. So far, it hasn’t showed any carcinogenic or toxic effects and don’t induce a glycemic response, which is great for diabetics and dieters.
And on another note, it tastes pretty great in tea or coffee! I even tried tasting it alone and it has a vaguely minty taste. I might have to pick some up next time I’m at the grocery store!
I was just hearing on NPR the other day that some marine bio researchers have discovered that octopuses actually secrete a chemical on their skin that acts as a repellent to their own suction cups on their arms. Without this chemical, the octopus would fold up on itself and not be able to release the suction cups on its body. When I heard this, I almost instantly thought of when we talked about the little pads on the bottom of geckos’ feet and how these little suction pads are able to hold the gecko on vertical surfaces because of van der Waals forces they create with the surface they interact with. It might make sense that these suction cups would have some hydrophobic residues in them since a suction underwater can only occur by the removal of water between the suction cup and the object its stuck to. This would provide an environment in which hydrophobic forces would be incredibly strong. I wonder, maybe this chemical secreted by the octopus coats its skin in polar/charged residues that repel the hydrophobic/nonpolar suction cups? Just a thought!
In cellular physiology, one of the topics we studied was cell junctions between epithelial cells. One type of cellular junction that exists in these epithelial cells is called anchoring junctions. These junctions connect these cells to other cells and/or cells to the basal lamina below the epithelial tissue. These junctions are what allow epithelial tissue to redistribute and transmit stress. But it turns out that these connections aren’t actually connections. They are mediated by interactions between transmembrane proteins called cadherins. These cadherins interact with cadherins on the adjacent cells and create an extremely tight junction between the epithelial cells. We quickly touched on these protein functions in clas, but never explained how they are able to interact so strongly. Its cool because now with some biochem knowledge, I can assume that there are electrostatic interactions between the residues on these interacting cadherins, since these interactions would create the strongest noncovalent association between these two proteins. Basically, our skin would fall apart without non covalent interactions!