Estrogen Alters Memory Circuit Function In Women With Gene Variant

Liver Circulation - Flashcard

The liver is supplied with blood by the hepatic artery and the hepatic portal vein

branches of the hepatic artery and the hepatic portal vein distribute blood to the periphery of the liver lobules.

Blood passes along sinusoids, which are lined by hepatocytes, which perform numerous metabolic and synthetic functions. 

The processed blood passes into branches of the hepatic vein in the centre of each lobule, and eventually drains into the hepatic vein. 

The biliary system is independent of the vascular system and bile moves in the opposite direction to the blood. 

Initially it is collected in bile ductules which are surrounded by collagenous tissue, which forms part of the collagenous trabecular septum. 

The bile is collected by increasingly large trabecular ducts, which fuse to form intrahepatic ducts which finally drain into the main hepatic ducts.

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarded to Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir Fraser Stoddart, and Bernard Feringa for the design and production of molecular machines with controllable movements: bit.ly/NobelSci2016

Here’s something cool to do with your leftover candy corn – all you have to do is head to space.

Astronauts are allowed to bring special “crew preference” items when they go up in space. NASA astronaut Don Pettit chose candy corn for his five and a half month stint aboard the International Space Station. But these candy corn were more than a snack, Pettit used them for experimentation.

See how he did it:

Antibiotic Resistance Will Soon Hit the Tipping Point, Unless We Act

Antibiotic Resistance Will Soon Hit the Tipping Point, Unless We Act

Antibiotic-resistant superbugs are enough of a severe, genuine threat to global populations that the UN has placed the issue on par with the spread of Ebola and HIV. The livestock industry is a major factor contributing to the rapid proliferation of these superbugs, swift action is required.

A required read from Michael Oman-Reagan.

This is all true. This all happened in Canada, and its very likely it will happen in the USA under Trump and be worse than Harper’s crackdown on Science ever was.

Links cited in this twitter essay:

The Big Chill: “Scientists Can’t Do the Job They Were Hired to Do”

More than 1000 Jobs Lost, Climate Program Hit Hard in Coming Environment Canada Cuts

Harper Government Trashes Another Federal Science Library

Federal scientists closely monitored during polar conference

Science Silenced: US Scientist Caught in Canadian Muzzle Climate-change scientists feel ‘muzzled’ by Ottawa: Documents

The Canadian War on Science: A long, unexaggerated, devastating chronological indictment

http://ourrighttoknow.ca/

http://write2know.ca/

https://evidencefordemocracy.ca

Swarms of magnetic bacteria could be used to deliver drugs to tumors 

Researchers funded in part by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) have recently shown that magnetic bacteria are a promising vehicle for more efficiently delivering tumor-fighting drugs. They reported their results in the August 2016 issue of Nature Nanotechnology.

Ouajdi Felfoul, Mahmood Mohammadi, Samira Taherkhani, Dominic de Lanauze, Yong Zhong Xu, Dumitru Loghin, Sherief Essa, Sylwia Jancik, Daniel Houle, Michel Lafleur, Louis Gaboury, Maryam Tabrizian, Neila Kaou, Michael Atkin, Té Vuong, Gerald Batist, Nicole Beauchemin, Danuta Radzioch, Sylvain Martel. Magneto-aerotactic bacteria deliver drug-containing nanoliposomes to tumour hypoxic regions. Nature Nanotechnology, 2016; DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2016.137

Illustration showing magnetic bacteria delivering drugs to a tumor. Credit: NanoRobotics Laboratory, Polytechnique Montreal

Evidence suggests women’s ovaries can grow new eggs 

Scientists have uncovered the first evidence that the human ovary may be able to grow new eggs in adulthood.

If confirmed, the discovery would overturn the accepted view that women are born with a fixed number of eggs and that the body has no capacity to increase this supply. Until now this has been the main constraint on the female reproductive lifespan. The findings, if replicated, would raise the prospect of new treatments to allow older women to conceive and for infertility problems in younger women.

The small study, involving cancer patients, showed that ovarian biopsies taken from young women who had been given a chemotherapy drug had a far higher density of eggs than healthy women of the same age.

Prof Evelyn Telfer, who led the work at the University of Edinburgh, said: “This was something remarkable and completely unexpected for us. The tissue appeared to have formed new eggs. The dogma is that the human ovary has a fixed population of eggs and that no new eggs form throughout life.”

Ovarian biopsies taken from young women who had been given a particular chemotherapy drug showed that the tissue appeared to have formed new eggs. Photograph: Science Picture Co/Getty Images/Science Faction

Original illustrations from the 1851 edition of the Iconographic Encyclopedia of Science, Literature and Art by J.G. Heck.

If you dropped a water balloon on a bed of nails, you’d expect it to burst spectacularly. And you’d be right – some of the time. Under the right conditions, though, you’d see what a high-speed camera caught in the animation above: a pancake-shaped bounce with nary a leak. Physically, this is a scaled-up version of what happens to a water droplet when it hits a superhydrophobic surface. 

Water repellent superhydrophobic surfaces are covered in microscale roughness, much like a bed of tiny nails. When the balloon (or droplet) hits, it deforms into the gaps between posts. In the case of the water balloon, its rubbery exterior pulls back against that deformation. (For the droplet, the same effect is provided by surface tension.) That tension pulls the deformed parts of the balloon back up, causing the whole balloon to rebound off the nails in a pancake-like shape. For more, check out this video on the student balloon project or the original water droplet research. (Image credits: T. Hecksher et al., Y. Liu et al.; via The New York Times; submitted by Justin B.)

Social Stress Leads To Changes In Gut Bacteria

Exposure to psychological stress in the form of social conflict alters gut bacteria in Syrian hamsters, according to a new study by Georgia State University.

It has long been said that humans have “gut feelings” about things, but how the gut might communicate those “feelings” to the brain was not known. It has been shown that gut microbiota, the complex community of microorganisms that live in the digestive tracts of humans and other animals, can send signals to the brain and vice versa.

In addition, recent data have indicated that stress can alter the gut microbiota. The most common stress experienced by humans and other animals is social stress, and this stress can trigger or worsen mental illness in humans. Researchers at Georgia State have examined whether mild social stress alters the gut microbiota in Syrian hamsters, and if so, whether this response is different in animals that “win” compared to those that “lose” in conflict situations.

Hamsters are ideal to study social stress because they rapidly form dominance hierarchies when paired with other animals. In this study, pairs of adult males were placed together and they quickly began to compete, resulting in dominant (winner) and subordinate (loser) animals that maintained this status throughout the experiment. Their gut microbes were sampled before and after the first encounter as well as after nine interactions. Sampling was also done in a control group of hamsters that were never paired and thus had no social stress. The researchers’ findings are published in the journal Behavioural Brain Research.

“We found that even a single exposure to social stress causes a change in the gut microbiota, similar to what is seen following other, much more severe physical stressors, and this change gets bigger following repeated exposures,” said Dr. Kim Huhman, Distinguished University Professor of Neuroscience at Georgia State. “Because ‘losers’ show much more stress hormone release than do ‘winners,’ we initially hypothesized that the microbial changes would be more pronounced in animals that lost than in animals that won.”

“Interestingly, we found that social stress, regardless of who won, led to similar overall changes in the microbiota, although the particular bacteria that were impacted were somewhat different in winners and losers. It might be that the impact of social stress was somewhat greater for the subordinate animals, but we can’t say that strongly.”

Another unique finding came from samples that were taken before the animals were ever paired, which were used to determine if any of the preexisting bacteria seemed to correlate with whether an animal turned out to be the winner or loser.

“It’s an intriguing finding that there were some bacteria that seemed to predict whether an animal would become a winner or a loser,” Huhman said.

“These findings suggest that bi-directional communication is occurring, with stress impacting the microbiota, and on the other hand, with some specific bacteria in turn impacting the response to stress,” said Dr. Benoit Chassaing, assistant professor in the Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State.

This is an exciting possibility that builds on evidence that gut microbiota can regulate social behavior and is being investigated by Huhman and Chassaing.