葛飾 北斎  Katsushika Hokusai (1760 - 1849) Fuji At Aoyama (Aoyama No Fuji): Detatched Page From

Muito bom!!

Resist the road-rage on the protein super highway.

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Sensation of Taste Is Built into Brain

Roast turkey. Stuffing. Mashed potatoes and gravy. Pie. Thanksgiving conjures up all sorts of flavors. If you close your eyes you can almost taste them. In fact, one day you may be able to—without food.

Scientists from Columbia University have figured out how to turn tastes on and off in the brain using optogenetics—a technique that uses penetrating light and genetic manipulation to turn brain cells on and off. They reported their findings in an article published in Nature. By manipulating brain cells in mice this way, the scientists were able to evoke different tastes without the food chemicals actually being present on the mice’s tongues.

The experiments “truly reconceptualize what we consider the sensory experience,” said Charles Zuker, head of the Zuker lab at Columbia and co-author on the paper. The results further demonstrate “that the sense of taste is hardwired in our brains,” Zuker said, unlike our sense of smell, which is strongly linked to taste but almost entirely dependent on experience.

Typically when we eat, the raised bumps, or papillae, that cover our tongues, pick up chemicals in foods and transmit tastes to the brain. There are five main types of papillae corresponding to each of the five basic tastes—sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami. Contrary to popular belief, these aren’t clustered in particular places on the tongue, with bitter in the back and sweet at the front, but are spaced about evenly on the tongue.

A taste map may in fact exist, but it appears to be in the brain rather than on the tongue. First the researchers singled out the mice’s sweet and bitter taste centers in the brain, which are separated by approximately two millimeters in the insula. They concentrated on only sweet and bitter because the two are the most distinct from each other and also the most salient for humans, mice and other animals due their evolutionary importance to survival. Sweet usually indicates the presence of nutrients, whereas bitter signals potential danger of poison.

Zuker and his team then optogenetically stimulated the areas with light and in a series of behavioral tests, were able to have the mice taste sweet or bitter with only plain water. When the researchers activated the sweet neurons, they observed behavior consistent what with happens when mice normally encounter sweet foods: their licking increased significantly, even when the animals’ thirst was satiated. When the scientists stimulated neurons associated with bitter flavors, the mice stopped licking, seemed to scrub at their tongues and even gagged, depending on the level of optogenetic stimulation.

The researchers then performed the tests on animals that had never tasted sweet or bitter in their lives and found the same results. In the last set of experiments the researchers applied to the tongue of the mice chemicals that tasted sweet and bitter and compared their reactions to what happened when they simply stimulated the corresponding neurons optogenetically. There was no difference in the way the animals responded, “proving taste is hardwired in the brain,” Zuker said.

This doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as an “acquired taste,” Zuker clarified. For example, hákarl, fermented shark meat and national dish of Iceland, once called “the single worst, most disgusting and terrible tasting thing,” by famously acerbic food critic Anthony Bourdain is relished by many on the Nordic island nation. Humans are more complicated than mice. Taste can also be shaped by experience and culture. But the basics of this sensation are present from the beginning.

“Every baby smiles to sweet and frowns for bitter,” Zuker explained. “Taste mostly retains that hardwired response unless there is something that supersedes it. There are some things we consume [that] are innately aversive. But we take the gain with the bad if they have a positively reinforcing result.” Coffee or alcohol, for instance, are distinctly bitter, but many people learn to enjoy them over time due to the feelings of stimulation and inebriation they bring, respectively.

Gary Beauchamp, president of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Pennsylvania, calls the research “a very clear and elegant approach,” confirming the long-standing hypothesis that taste is indeed evolutionarily hardwired. But Beauchamp also notes that sweet and bitter compounds can influence each other in the mouth to affect taste before they reach the brain. “In the real world, where foods are mixtures of things, it’s much more complex than what this study would suggest. Nevertheless, this is excellent work showing that these pathways are innately organized,” he said.  

Zuker is aware that sweet and bitter are at the extremes of the taste spectrum and may not be representative of all tastes. But he expects similar results testing other tastes, which are also evolutionarily based. Salt, for example, signals electrolytes. “The next question is how activity in these cortical fields integrates with rest of brain,” to form experience and lasting taste memories – such as those we make at Thanksgiving.

Source: Scientific American

Simplesmente Sútil

Gardens at Nijo Castle, Kyoto, Japan

Tōshi Yoshida 吉田 遠志 (1911 – 1995) Birds of the Seasons - Summer, circa 1982

A Lua Entre as nuvens De uma noite Suave Brisa Cheirosa

Don’t Be Alarmed; Be Careful

 I’ve seen a few headlines covering this story in a very sensationalist way. Though the shock factor may get more hits, I feel that that’s irresponsible. Panic can cause people to act irrationally. So before you make a snap judgement from the map, please read the rest of the article. One of the ways we can hope to minimise the casualties is if people are careful and informed.

 When autoimmune deficiency (AIDS) reached the public eye in the 1980s, very little was known about it, and what information there was wasn’t always easily available. Much of the information was spread by public hysteria through word of mouth and misguided sensationalist media. You could be forgiven for thinking that it was an unstoppable bioweapon; some people did and still do. It was believed you could contract the virus simply through close contact with another person.

Unfortunately, we’re seeing the emergence of a disease which fits the profile of what the public thought AIDS could be in the 1980s.  A recent document published by the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates around 75 million deaths worldwide by 2050 due to two emerging strains of tuberculosis (TB). These are known as multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) and extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB). Tuberculosis certainly doesn’t have the same level of exposure and public awareness that HIV/AIDS does, yet TB kills the second largest number of people worldwide, second to HIV/AIDS. On top of this, it is also the greatest killer of people with HIV/AIDS through secondary infection, killing a quarter of those who contract HIV.

Tuberculosis is spread by coughs and sneezing, as the bacteria are suspended in mucous and saliva droplets. This can then transfer onto objects and surfaces where it can survive for hours. Though the projections are estimated to affect mostly developing countries, we must remember that humans can and will travel, so this disease will easily be spread.

For so long, TB has gone mostly ignored, apart from in the UK  where the British government has ordered small badger culls since 2013 to prevent the spread of bovine TB. Until this year, the US government was only concerned with prevention in its own citizens, the Obama administration has now released a 3-5 year plan to fund research and aid to tackle these drug-resistant strains in the developing world as of September 2015. With the UK currently undergoing proposals within both the House of Commons and the House of Lords on how to proceed, hopefully other wealthy nations will follow suit to try and eradicate this pathogen before we see too many more casualties.

So remember: Sneeze into the crook of your elbow, wash your hands, and try not to spread coughs and sneezes. By being publicly conscious, we can do our part.

-Will

A public information booklet can be found here: http://media.wix.com/ugd/309c93_f0731d24f4754cd4a0ac0d6f6e67a526.pdf

A fact sheet here: http://www.who.int/tb/challenges/mdr/mdr_tb_factsheet.pdf

And a paper here: https://idsa.confex.com/idsa/2015/webprogram/Paper50670.html

2017

Palavras entre nós Não tenho dinheiro Mas tenho você E eu tenho você Tenho tudo.

O que poderemos ver com o James Webb?

Sonhar Com mundos distantes Possibilidades Eternas.

Solar System: Top 5 Things to Know This Week

1. A Ceres of Fortunate Events

Our Dawn mission continues its exploration at Ceres, and the team is working with the data coming back to Earth, looking for explanations for the tiny world’s strange features. Follow Dawn’s expedition HERE.

2. Icy Moon Rendezvous

One of the most interesting places in the entire solar system is Saturn’s moon Enceladus, with its underground ocean and spectacular geyser plume. This month, the Cassini spacecraft will be buzzing close by Enceladus several times, the last such encounters of the mission. On October 14, Cassini will perform a targeted flyby at a distance of just 1,142 miles (1,838 kilometers) over the moon’s northern latitudes. Ride along with Cassini HERE.

3. Make Your Own Mars Walkabout

You can retrace Opportunity’s journey, see where the Curiosity rover is now, or even follow along with fictional astronaut Mark Watney from The Martian movie using the free online app MarsTrek. The app lets you zoom in on almost any part of the planet and see images obtained by our spacecraft, so you can plan your on Red Planet excursion. Take a hike HERE.

4. Elusive Features on Jupiter

New imagery from our Hubble Space Telescope is capturing details never before seen on Jupiter. High-resolution maps and spinning globes, rendered in the 4K Ultra HD format, reveal an elusive wave and changes to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. Explore Jupiter HERE.

5. Mr. Blue Sky

Another week, another amazing picture from Pluto. The first color images of Pluto’s atmospheric hazes, returned by our New Horizons spacecraft last week, reveal that the hazes are blue. Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? Most of the data collected during July’s Pluto flyby remains aboard the spacecraft, but the team publishes new batches of pictures and other findings on a weekly basis. Keep up with the latest HERE.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Silk leaf

http://www.dezeen.com/2014/07/25/movie-silk-leaf-first-man-made-synthetic-biological-leaf-space-travel/