Archive for June, 2015
NIH approves strategic vision to transform National Library of Medicine
Wednesday, June 17th, 2015Great focus on datascience for the NLMhttp://www.nih.gov/news/health/jun2015/od-11.htm
School gets two new departments: Emergency medicine and biomedical data science | News Center | Stanford Medicine
Wednesday, June 17th, 2015A datas science dept & a merger of bioinformatics & biostat
apple researchkit
Wednesday, June 17th, 2015BMC Medicine | Full text | The evolution of mobile apps for asthma: an updated systematic assessment of content and tools
Tuesday, June 16th, 2015Is the Secret to Longevity Available from this Website? | MIT Technology Review
Tuesday, June 16th, 2015Is the Secret to Longevity Available from this
Website?http://www.technologyreview.com/news/534636/the-anti-aging-pill NAD-replenishment pill w/ co-factor precursor + antioxidant
(NB: I’ve advised Elysium.)
QT:{{”
““NAD replacement is one of the most exciting things happening in the biology of aging,” says Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, who has coauthored scientific papers with Guarente but is not involved in Elysium. “The frustration in our field is that we have shown we can target aging, but the FDA does not [recognize it] as an indication.”
Other experts said while NAD may decline with age, there is limited evidence that aging can be affected by restoring or increasing NAD levels. “There is enough evidence to be excited, but not completely compelling evidence,” said Brian K. Kennedy, CEO of the
California-based Buck Institute for Research on Aging.
Guarente says Elysium’s pill includes a precursor to NAD, called nicotinamide riboside, which the body can transform into NAD and put to use. In addition, the pill contains pterostilbene, an antioxidant that Guarente says stimulates sirtuins in a different way. Both ingredients can already be found in specialty vitamins. “We expect a synergistic effect [from] combining them,” he says.”
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Visualizing virus assembly intermediates inside marine cyanobacteria : Nature : Nature Publishing Group
Tuesday, June 16th, 2015Visualizing virus assembly…inside…bacteria
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v502/n7473/full/nature12604.html Phase-contrast #cryoET resolves subcellular structures (eg ribosomes)
Cryo-ET determines diff structural snapshots virus during assembly. One tomogram to work out whole pathway.
Wei Dai,
Caroline Fu,
Desislava Raytcheva,
John Flanagan,
Htet A. Khant,
Xiangan Liu,
Ryan H. Rochat,
Cameron Haase-Pettingell,
Jacqueline Piret,
Steve J. Ludtke,
Kuniaki Nagayama,
Michael F. Schmid,
Jonathan A. King
& Wah Chiu
Nature 502, 707–710 (31 October 2013) doi:10.1038/nature12604
Orderly order in protein intrinsic disorder distribution: disorder in 3500 proteomes from viruses and the three domains of life
Tuesday, June 16th, 2015Disorder in 3500 #proteomes from viruses and 3 domains of life http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07391102.2012.675145 Larger human fraction of disordered residues (>40%)
Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics
Volume 30, Issue 2, 2012
DOI:10.1080/07391102.2012.675145B
Xue, A. Keith Dunker & Vladimir N. Uversky
pages 137-149
Did natural selection make the Dutch the tallest people on the planet?
Tuesday, June 16th, 2015Did natural #selection make the Dutch the tallest people on the
planet? http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2015/04/did-natural-selection-make-dutch-tallest-people-planet Height spurt in last century not all nurture
QT:{{”
“This study drives home the message that the human population is still subject to natural selection,” says Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University who wasn’t involved in the study. “It strikes at the core of our understanding of human nature, and how malleable it is.” It also confirms what Stearns knows from personal experience about the population in the northern Netherlands, where the study took place: “Boy, they are tall.”
…
“For many years, the U.S. population was the tallest in the world. In the 18th century, American men were 5 to 8 centimeters taller than those in the Netherlands. Today, Americans are the fattest, but they lost the race for height to northern Europeans—including Danes, Norwegians, Swedes, and Estonians—sometime in the 20th century.
Just how these peoples became so tall isn’t clear, however. Genetics has an important effect on body height: Scientists have found at least 180 genes that influence how tall you become. Each one has only a small effect, but together, they may explain up to 80% of the variation in height within a population. Yet environmental factors play a huge role as well. The children of Japanese immigrants to Hawaii, for instance, grew much taller than their parents. Scientists assume that a diet rich in milk and meat played a major role.
The Dutch have become so much taller in such a short period that scientists chalk most of it up to their changing environment. As the Netherlands developed, it became one of the world’s largest producers and consumers of cheese and milk. An increasingly egalitarian distribution of wealth and universal access to health care may also have helped.”
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