Who you gonna call - Johns Hopkins
FRUIT FLY CELLS / GREEN THING FROM GHOSTBUSTERS MIGRATING ACROSS AN EGG.
What is it that makes cancer cells migrate from the main site of growth to other healthy tissues and how exactly do they move? A professor of Biological Chemistry at Johns Hopkins called Denise Montell (along with her team) have just brought us one step closer to finding out, and made a nifty video in the process.
In a impressive display of patience, Dr Montell and her team spent a year feeding a cluster of fruit fly cells inside an egg chamber with different solutions, trying to find the right one that would make the cluster migrate from one side of the egg to the other. These fruit fly cells are not cancerous, but what they are doing resembles what the cancer cells do and how they move. However, you can't watch them moving inside the ovary but if you take them out of the ovary they refuse to budge. Hence the need for the ideal medium to get them going. When the team finally hit on the perfect formula, they made a video, and you can now watch that process of cell migration online. You can see from video that different cells seem to take the lead in propelling the cluster forward at any one time, a movement compared to a flock of geese or a pack of cyclists. The team have also discovered a key protein that encourages this movement, called Kuzbanian. This will all translate to a better understanding of clinically useful cell migrations as well as cancer cell migrations.
One final thing, is there not an eerie similarity between the migrating cells and that green thing from Ghostbusters?
Newsflash - London not so filthy after all!
It's official! London really isn't that dirty anymore! Well, the wetlands around Greater London aren't anyway. Squacco herons haven't been seen in the vicinity of my home town for a century and a half, but one was spotted in Crossness Nature Reserve in Bexley on the 29th of May. More importantly, the bird didn't take one sniff of the local sights and hotfoot it home again, it's been there ever since. The nature reserve has recently spend a hefty wedge on regenerating their wildlife zones, so they're understandably delighted.
The heron was last seen in London in 1866. For a little historical perspective, that was the middle of Queen Victoria's reign, the year after Abraham Lincoln died, and the year (according to wikipedia) that Darwin decided to grow his fantastic world-beating beard. 1866 was also the year the urinal was patented, the year that the Canadian Parliament met for the first time, and the year that root beer and dynamite were invented. But all of those events are frankly boring compared to the last known sighting of a squacco heron in north west London. So the arrival of one of these small beige birds (it's London, of course the bird would be beige, no hot pink flamingoes for us) after such a long time is big news for British twitchers (and anyone who cares about a nice clean environment).
Via BBC News.
Salad dressing face mask to the rescue
'Restoring' priceless works of art has never been an easy task. While it might have seemed like a good idea back in the 1960s to cover the porous marble of Michelangelo's David (and plenty of other valuable frescoes) in an acrylic polymer called paraloid, now it just seems downright insane. But how do you get the toxic coating off once you've plastered it on? Not with a nail brushes that's for sure. So step up the face mask.
A team from the University of Florence have discovered a way to make oil and water mix, by using a sugar-like molecule to emulsify them. Like a nanoparticle salad dressing without the vinegar. Or mustard. Anyway, the artwork is draped in thin Japanese paper and then the 'dressing' is poured on. This poultice is left on for a couple of hours and hey presto, no more paraloid. This technique only works where the slap happy sixties restorers plastered their paraloid, it's no help where other damage has been done in the name of restoration. But for David and his compatriots, it's good news indeed.
Via ABC News Australia. (PHOTO: NZRIC)
Chatty paper
CAN SPEAKING PAPER FIGURE OUT A WAY TO MAKE MONEY LITERALLY TALK? (PHOTO: MANJIDES)
A team from Mid Sweden University have produced a prototype billboard embedded with conductive inks and printed speakers, so that when you touch it it plays audio at you. The article in BBC News says that the inventors think it could be useful in product packaging - and I do see the temptation. However, I don't really need my yoghurt to tell me how many grammes of fat it has or exactly how tasty it is. That would cause quite the cacophony in supermarkets.
Seems to me that this would be more useful for blind people, as a high-tech version of braille. But there'd presumably have to be some way of listening privately though (a printed headphone jack perhaps), otherwise you could reach the end of your intellectual magazine only to find it suddenly starts shouting out all the adverts for sex phone lines that are printed at the back. Very embarrassing.
As light as a geological hammer
A little bit of magic for a drizzly Monday morning (unless of course it's sunny everywhere but Britain...) comes to you courtesy of NASA.com and features a phenomenon called the equivalence principle. Back in the 16th century, Galileo Galilei rolled spheres made of different materials down a long slope, and showed that even though the spheres were very different, they reached the bottom of the slope at the same time. He concluded that gravity accelerates all objects equally regardless of their masses or the materials from which they are made. This 36 year old video shows astronaut David Scott, demonstrating just that, by standing on the moon and dropping a
heavy geological hammer and a light falcon feather. Both items hit the
ground at the same time, reinforcing Galileo's theory.
The experiment shown in the above video isn't necessarily the most accurate scientific demonstration (nor is it brilliant quality, unsurprisingly), but it was the first such demonstration to be done on the moon, and it's very eye-catching. Even though you know the outcome, it's just impossible to make your brain accept that the hammer and the feather will fall at the same rate. And yet they do.
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