Better Living through Cell Biology

Research/Narration by Amro Hamdoun
Images by Perrin Ireland

There are many persistent industrial chemicals that accumulate in marine life and in our bodies. For many years we have had problems predicting which industrial chemicals will be persistent in the environment.

Artist Perrin Ireland worked with Amro Hamdoun to explain how current research in cell biology might be used to to prevent this problem from happening in the future. Click the link below to watch Perrin’s beautiful watercolor art unfold.

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Cholesterol: Friend Before Foe

Scientific American: Cholesterol from Alphachimp Studio Inc. on Vimeo.
Text by Jeanne Garbarino. Images by Perrin Ireland. Video by Nick Navatta

Yes, when in excess, cholesterol can be very detrimental to your health and is often the culprit behind heart attacks and strokes. However, behind the seemingly dangerous exterior lies a molecule that is essential for human life.

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Insights from the Science and Public Leadership Fellows Program

At the PopTech Science and Public Leadership Fellows retreat at National Geographic headquarters earlier this month, the program’s faculty provided key insights to help equip the 2011 Fellows with enhanced leadership, collaboration and communication skills.

Member of this group are high-potential early- and mid-career scientists working in areas of critical importance to the nation and the planet. They represent a corps of highly visible and socially engaged scientific leaders who embody science as an essential way of thinking, discovering, understanding and deciding.

Jeff Nesbit, Dennis Dimick and Lisa Witter on storytelling

For a taste of their ideas, have a look at...

1. Graphic Record produced by Alphachimp: http://bit.ly/PopTechSciFellows11scribe
2. The Full Story on the PopTech blog: http://bit.ly/PopTechSciFellows11
3. Video of 2010 Science Fellows at: http://poptech.org/sciencefellows/

2010 PopTech Paintings

Peter's mobile paint studio in the Camden Opera House. For deep coverage of the speakers, videos, photos and links to projects and organizations.

Check out the amazing work done by the PopTech Blogging Team at http://poptech.org/blog

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The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Humans Closest Relative

"It is a world full of conflicts." notes Jon Stewart in his intro to this report. "Some are more important than others. And some are much, much less."

In the contentious field of science, there are many accepted truths. These two ape scientists duke it out over who is our closest ancestor. Fortunately, The Daily Show correspondent John Oliver is there to conduct an evidence-based debate: Chimps vs. Orangutans.

(A 'must-see' in that you must see the scientist with a mohawk who lacks any capacity for self-deprication or free-style rap skills.)

Comparing the Human and Chimpanzee Genomes

(via FlowingData)

As part of the Explore Evolution exhibit at the University of Nebraska State Museum, Judy Diamond displays a segment of the human genome in line with that of the chimpanzee that matches very closely. The point is to show how similar two are with the few differences represented by a drawing of a man, distinguished geneticist Svante Paabo.

See video of scintist Richard Dawkins explaining the exhibit.

TED: Louise Leakey: Paleoanthropologist

In 1999, I visited the Rift Valley in East Africa and sketched the Olduvai Gorge where Louis Leakey, his wife and family members scratched and dug out the earliest ancestors to humans. It is good to see that the family is carrying on the tradition of asking: "Who are we?"

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Monkey See, Monkey Duplicate

Researchers get stem cells from cloned monkeys.

clipped from www.reuters.com U.S. researchers have cloned monkeys and used the resulting embryos to get embryonic stem cells, an important step towards being able to do the same thing in humans, they reported on Wednesday. Shoukhrat Mitalipov and colleagues at Oregon Health & Science University said they used skin cells from monkeys to create cloned embryos, and then extracted embryonic stem cells from these days-old embryos. This had only been done in mice before, they reported in the journal Nature. Mitalipov had given sketchy details of his work at a conference in Australia in June, but the work has now been independently verified by another team of experts.

What Chimpanzees Can Teach Us About Economics

(By the way, the experiment described in this article--involving struggles over fruit bars and chocolate--works on three-year-old humans and management consultants, too.)

clipped from www.vanderbilt.edu In a long standing enigma of economics and psychology, humans tend to immediately value an item they’ve just received more than the maximum amount they would have paid to get it to begin with. This tendency, known as the endowment effect, is something some economists consider a fluke, but new research finds that humans aren’t the only ones exhibiting an endowment effect. A new study co-authored by Vanderbilt professor Owen Jones, who is one of the nation’s few professors of both law and biology, uncovered the first evidence that chimpanzees exhibit an endowment effect similar to people. Specifically, the study showed that chimpanzees favor items they just received more than items they normally prefer that they could get through exchange. “Our results support the conclusion that the frequent failure to exchange a less-favored food for a more-preferred food was an active choice and is similar to the endowment effect behavior seen in humans,” said Jones.

Stinky? It's Not His Sweat, It's Your Nose

Dang. Finally, some support for the big, sweaty feller! I remember that, starting at age 13, I received the Brut or Olde English cologne seasonal gift box throughout my college years.

clipped from www.reuters.com CHICAGO (Reuters) - When it comes to a man's body odor, the fragrance -- or stench -- is in the nose of the beholder, according to U.S. researchers who suggest a single gene may determine how people perceive body odor. The study, published online on Sunday in the journal Nature, helps explain why the same sweaty man can smell like vanilla to some, like urine to others and for about a third of adults, have no smell at all. Matsunami and colleagues at Duke and Rockefeller University in New York focused on the chemical androstenone, which is created when the body breaks down the male sex hormone testosterone.