Author Archives: Peter

Purple greenhouses and happy lab rats this week

Comics: First – Previous – Next – Last

Next Generation of Greenhouses May Be Fully Solar Powered | NC State News

Plants crave the red and blue light (and reflect the green). So you can use the green light for electricity to blow air through your greenhouse. The panels absorb the green light, so the greenhouse looks purple. That’s so cool. There’s a real mathematical puzzle, though. How much light can you take to run the fans, heaters, desalinators, pumps, etc., before you start harming the plants’ growth?

Are happy lab animals better for science? | Science | AAAS

Enriched environments may make for better lab animal results (and happier lab animals). That’s good. I remember seeing that lab animals are much more prone to use substances self-destructively if they don’t have enriched/social environments. There’s even a TED talk, though it oversimplifies things.

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This week was a bit much in the news. I needed lighthearted reading.

Comics: First – Previous – Next – Last

Flow Reactor Created that Will Be Able to Mass Produce Amino Acids – NextBigFuture.com

This makes me think of electric lab meat. We could make some of the building blocks truly from scratch without needing plants. Plants are not actually very efficient chemists. Going from light to amino acids might actually be more energy efficient with photovoltaics and electrochemistry some day.

Your most pressing questions about the new coronavirus, answered | Science News

I’ve played Plague Inc. I know the drill. This one (coronavirus 2019nCoV) looks scary. But the powers that be seem to be on top of it. That’s nice.

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Innervated follicles and spider-moms

 

Hyperactivation of sympathetic nerves drives depletion of melanocyte stem cells | Nature

Why do we go gray after stress? Linkages between nerves and stem cells in our hair follicles! This happened to me in the month before my dissertation: I got gray in my beard. So strange.

 

Have the Boomers Pinched Their Children’s Futures? – with Lord David Willetts – YouTube

I am not an economist, but I think this talk articulates important issues. Larger cohorts have a strange weight in democracies.

 

Gregor Czaykowski on Twitter: “ha ha happy new year https://t.co/29c2r0hrBk” / Twitter

 

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TEM Video of Rhenium atoms and pygmy owls (two different links)

Walking with atoms — chemical bond making and breaking recorded in action 

The video on this page is truly astounding. From the main author: “We trapped a pair of rhenium (Re) atoms bonded together to form Re2. Because rhenium has a high atomic number it is easier to see in TEM than lighter elements… we observed the atomic-scale dynamics of Re2 adsorbed on the graphitic lattice of the nanotube and discovered that the bond length changes in Re2 in a series of discrete steps.”

 

Classification and practical approach to the diagnosis and management of hypersensitivity to nonsteroidal anti‐inflammatory drugs – Kowalski – 2013 – Allergy – Wiley Online Library

Here are several documented cases of angioedema from NSAIDs (like when I had my eye swell shut due to aspirin). I made a vlog about it.

 

The medications that change who we are – BBC Future

Mood, Personality, and Behavior Changes During Treatment with Statins: A Case Series.

Statins may be linked to mood changes in rare cases.

 

 

 

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How we feel ourselves and other mysteries

The quest to decipher how the body’s cells sense touch

If you close your eyes and hold out your hand, you know where your hand is. Without visual feedback, you can feel where your own hand is. This is called proprioception. Finding genes specifically associated with proprioception turned out to be hard. Some of the first were discovered in 2009. The proprioception protein called PIEZO1 looks really cool.

CDC flu data shows child deaths from influenza B – The Washington Post

Unfortunately, the flu shot only reduces risk and severity. It’s not a silver bullet. I think that’s a really hard thing to communicate to the public. It defies simple answers to simple questions like “does it work or not?”

Chuck Palahniuk on the Importance of Not Boring Your Reader | Literary Hub

Chuck imparted some good advice for writing. “Use cinematic transitions, not whitespace transitions,” he said. Then he swiped transparency off the projector and onto the floor. “And do not. talk. about. Fight. Club.”

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