Monthly Archives: May 2017

Fibril, filament, snRNPs, granular component etc

14CoS ko, hepatocytes, rescue with NTBC, Electron micrographs of liver, Nuclear pores and nuclear architecture, Nuclear symmetry during apoptosis, Nucleoar organization, The cell: images, Ultimate order, the cell

This micrograph I am using to determine the sizes of the different nuclear structures, so this is the first attempt to define at least four different sizes of components. For me, there is similarity in the size of the granules (beads on a string maybe something like 30 nm) in the cajal body and in the nucleolus. Arrows point to the kind of layered banding parallel strand look of the cajal bodies,  the red circle is about the size of a cytoplasmic ribosome (which would be something like 27nm) and the diameter of the rounded object beside the cajal body (something on the order of 60nm) and an even larger fibrillar component seen through out the fibrillar centers and also just a little above center left (orange spot) which might be 130 – 150nm.  So there are four measurements of fibrillar components in this nucleus, so far.  Will post more.

electron micrograph liver 14CoS ko nucleolar architecture

Nuclear component N symmetry

Nuclear symmetry during apoptosis, The cell: images, Ultimate order, the cell

I found the first ever reference I have read that indicates that there is nuclear and nuclear symmetry within the same cell.  This is something i have observed (i believe) and would love to draw attention to.  So here is an article from 1971, readily available online, by one of the oldies of electron microscopy and published back in the hay-day of TEM.  It clearly states that the studies of Phillips and Phillips (1969, in JCB) using cells in culture found a similarity between nucleoli of the same nucleus.

So here is a quick cut and paste from a publication in Micron which shows what I found in HeLa cells, to me (see left, original, and right, areas of bilateral symmetry with lines).  To me this is quite unmistakable.  So will work on this.   My thought is that it will ultimately relate to the N, or the ploidy of the cell.

Mono ribosomes

Nuclear pores and nuclear architecture, Nuclear symmetry during apoptosis, Nucleoar organization, The cell: images, Ultimate order, the cell

Cytoplasm of an HeLa cell grown in vitro, no UV exposure, but inhibitor of caspase 1 added.  Lots of monoribosomes in the cytoplasm.  So this is still part of a study to summarize the ultrastructure o the nucleus, nucleolus, in apoptosis. This nucleus has a very large nucleolus, large fibrillar centers, not that much dense fibrillar component but a large granular component. Not a great micrograph, but data, none-the-less.

 

These good words on why love should cast out fear: the result, better governance

Political - thoughts, Rants

Awesome text and recounting (albeit in the past) of how the election was won.  Please read it HERE for yourselves, but if you don’t want to make the leap to a new site, i have cut and pasted it below, with kind thanks to Sci Am, but be sure I will add a few comments below which will be in bold italics so you can sort them from the original article.

In case you missed it, on June 24th the UK voted to leave the European Union. This was despite the overwhelming number of experts saying that this would be a terrible idea. Yet, when the experts spoke, clearly only 48% of the population listened.

Brexit proponent and politician Michael Gove, even made it part of his platform to fight the nerds; “people in this country have had enough of experts.” Because, what do experts know about things, right? Wrong.

In a clearly historic referendum with immediate consequences, 52% of the population voted for Brexit. As the nerds predicted, the currency immediately plunged, the prospect of Scotland leaving the UK became “highly likely,” and many people felt betrayed by their country. Some of those who voted to leave immediately felt “regrexit” about their choice.

So, why should you care? Because our pro-Brexit politicians mirrored Trump’s campaign tactics and won. Far beyond the comparatively sensible argument of political sovereignty, Brexit campaigners won with anti-immigration invective, lies, and a misguided attempt to reclaim a past that never was. The press claimed we needed to make Britain great again. That’s not to say that the remain campaign did not try to use the fear as well – particularly the fear of a ruined economy—to try to keep the UK in the EU, but this was not nearly as emotional an appeal as the tactics used by the Brexit camp.

I have already written about the influence of false memories of a glorious past on political voting, but xenophobia and expert shaming are on another level all-together.

What I’m saying to you, my dear American friends, is that if these tactics can win in the UK, they can also win in the US. It adds to my concern that Trump winning the US presidency is a definite possibility. I don’t think that another campaign like Obama’s, which was largely based on a positive vision for the future and a generally logical approach, will win an election in the current social climate.

If you don’t want an unqualified maniac running your country, listen up. HAHA

An appeal to fear (LYING< EMAIL HACKING, LIAR, PUT IN JAIL)

The kind of fear-driven political propaganda used by Trump and the Brexiters is called argumentum ad metum, or an ‘appeal to fear.’ This is a logically unsound way of presenting information. This approach tries to argue”

Either P or Q is true.

Q is scary.

Therefore, P is true.  (SO insightful)

Although this is an invalid argument, making no logical sense, on its surface it can be quite compelling. This is because fear is a powerful motivator, in terms of memory and decision-making.

(OK this is going to be a periperal comment, but so important…. but do you see why the campaign (of christ which is “love one another, love your enemy, do good, do not be afraid) is a rational life-choice….. Love casts out fear, if in fear we use peripheral processing, less than rational we make decisions without using the facts. But when we use love for all brothers, as a way to minimize fear, then in love we use central processing, making rational decisions about life and daily events… too awesome)

Why fear wins

As I talk about for an entire chapter in my new book, The Memory Illusion, emotion and memory have a complex relationship. But research suggests that, overall, we are more likely to remember a statement that is highly emotional than something that is not.

This is mostly because adding emotions to claims means that we are storing two separate things – the claim and the emotion. For memory, this adds some complexity to the storage of this information in your brain, making a bigger memory network that is more likely to be recalled later.

We also know that emotions, particularly fear, can have a profound impact on decision making. When we are afraid, or asked to focus on arguments based on fear, we generally shift into something called peripheral processing.

Peripheral processing happens when we form an opinion based on cues that surround an argument, at its periphery. This is the information, like emotion, or the attractiveness of a speaker, that is related to how a message is presented rather than the message itself.

This is why arguments suggesting that the EU is bullying the U.K., or that migrants to the U.S. could be undercover ISIS agents, lead to decisions that are often less-than-evidence-based.

Why “ordinary people” don’t trust experts

Peripheral processing is also why people might ignore the advice of experts. They are focusing on their emotion and other things that don’t actually contribute to the logic of an argument.

Peripheral processing stands in contrast to so-called central processing. Central processing refers to situations in which we try to make deliberate arguments where we weigh the evidence and logic of the argument. This is almost always what experts do.

These are both part of something called the Elaboration Likelihood Model. As it turns out, this model suggests that we rarely can engage in both types of decision-making at once. That means that if we have been lulled into a superficial (peripheral), engagement with the information that we are asked to make decisions about, this largely excludes our ability to process the information deeply (central).

When pundits argue that people don’t need experts, they are actively trying to push you from using central processing to a peripheral approach. They are asking you to turn off your logic and turn on your emotion, because they know that it is difficult to use logic once fear takes over.

This is also why politicians like Trump and the Brexiters like to say they represent “ordinary people.” Of course, “ordinary people” don’t exist. Even if they did, they’d be unlikely to be a billionaire or an old-Etonian who delivers speeches in Latin. Presenters of such arguments are trying to make you feel negative emotions against an imaginary opponent (usually the ‘elites,’ who also don’t actually exist), trying to get you to disregard evidence and logic.

What I want to leave you with is this; know that emotion-based campaigns can be incredibly compelling, and that they can severely cloud memory and decision making. Don’t repeat the mistakes of the British EU ‘Remain’ campaign, which severely overestimated the impact of calling on evidence and experts to convince people to vote in their favor.

If you want an effective campaign, you need more than logic and evidence, you also need a strong appeal to fundamental emotions. Unless you want Trump as your next president, that is.

Bet’cha can’t eat just one: the obese epidemic

Health - opinions, Rants

This is a phrase (if memory serves me right, and i will check) it was Lays  maybe even before Frito’s became Frito Lay.  It was cute and catchy and its purpose was to make you think, by mental manipulation, you cannot stop eating their product.  It is meant too, to physically addict you, salt refined sugars and fat (and yes even glutamines).

What is perplexing is that in all the data that has been presented that being obese is correlated (and of course i said correlated not causes, though in my heart i think it is causality) with western diseases, which continually plague americans: heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, immune disorders.

What is different about today’s diet is that it is consumed without regard for what is necessary, and what is healthful. It is consumed because someone knew you would eat it, because they stacked the cards against you, they added all those things which make you eat more than one.  Shame on big food companies.

I wonder if they are in ca-hoots with big pharma… afterall the obesity epidemic spikes the western diseases and no one wants to “eat just one” so they would rather “take a pill” than get their behinds off the sofa and run around the block, or heaven forbid, take up a sport that takes some energy and coordination and teamwork.

WHo is to blame for the obesity epidemic? Well ultimately it is the consumer, but the consumer has to have iron-will to avoid what is deliberately out there to addict him.

I googled “bet you cant eat just one” and up came 4 million posts.  not-so ha ha.

Here is some real science
DiPatrizio NV1, Astarita G, Schwartz G, Li X, Piomelli D. Endocannabinoid signal in the gut controls dietary fat intake. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2011 Aug 2;108(31):12904-8. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1104675108. Epub 2011 Jul 5.
Abstract begins thusly: “Oral sensory signals drive dietary fat intake, but the neural mechanisms underlying this process are largely unknown.”

Reposting one site: soleiletoile/flickr  read it here

In his book, “The End of Overeating,” former FDA commissioner David Kessler charges food companies with deliberately manipulating the chemical composition of their products to make them addictive to people with vulnerable brain chemistries— i.e., children. Kessler participated in subsequent research that found similarities in how rat’s brains experienced withdrawal symptoms similar to drug withdrawal then, after being fed by a high fat, high sugar mix, they were suddenly put on a diet. The food industry dismissed Kessler’s claims by ignoring them, and one of their top lobbyists admitted that the strategy was deliberate: to respond would call attention to the claims and force the good companies into a tit-for-tat debate about neuroscience. Kessler believes that many food companies ought to be publicly shamed for constructing and marketing addictive, unhealthy food to kids.

Science bashers, science deniers

Rants, Sara-Witts-end

Know what would be cool?? A self-correcting mechanism in which you no longer get to participate in whichever scientific or Newtonian law that you deny.

So, like, all the people that don’t believe in gravity, just fall off of the face off the earth and the vaccinations their parents were smart enough to get them just suddenly stop working.

(sara-witts-end.com)

I could add to this list, many times over, those who deny historical events with so much evidence that one would have to reject all of our previous history to deny; those who deny climate change (that is just so laughable…. of course the climate changes, and will change, and it has nothing to do with whether we caused it or not, it is going to change (not to excuse any wasteful non-environmental-hedonist behavior)…just to name 2.

So the next level of investigations take us to NASA’s description of gravity and microgravity. HERE. Awesome. And here are some definitions from their site.

Words to Know:
Free fall: the condition of moving freely in an environment in which gravity, and nothing else, is causing acceleration
Vacuum: the absence of all matter, including air
Mass: the measurement for the amount of matter in an object

 

Time Warner Cable: Spectrum

Rants

This post is short and sweet: completely self-explanatory. It needs no bold font, underscore or images.
I called TWC Spectrum to see how much I could reduce my monthly bill by removing TV altogether (the plan is to go with antenna TV and local broadcasting only). The reply was, “your bill will go from 65 to 89 dollars a month” HaHa, to remove TV, I pay them an extra 30 dollars a month. Who is in charge there.

How old is old data?

Health - opinions, Rants

I just now felt compelled to rant about the “time” factor and what we assume equates with “validity” in science.  Is a publication ‘good’ if it is more than a few nanoseconds old? do we disregard it as being nonsense if it was published 50 years ago?  Good grief, even those things published 15 years ago, part of this new century, could be considered old.

There is subconscious bias of “time” and “exclusion” in our current social climate. This applies to “breaking news” and “breaking science”. Are those observations more valid because they are ten milliseconds old, and how many second will they be current, and how many minutes till they are considered ‘old and out of date’?.

This ‘time’ bias is also seen in- (and maybe it is just spill-over)  from- the current culture of “youth”, ie, unless it is under 20, it cannot be beautiful, unless it is mobile-friendly, it is rejected by google, unless it moves at warp factor 9 through a jillion high impact image accompanied by blaring noise, it is old school.clock timepiece circles

I reject this. For tens of thousands of years “man” in the inclusive and broadest sense of the word, has been forming ideas, recording data, and in essence, making scientific discoveries. That we pass these observations off as inconsequential, nonsense, and valueless, because they are old is the worst type of unmerited egotism. This behavior spreads the idiotic notion of “i am worth it” (which of course suggests that one thinks one’s self and one’s thoughts are of more value than others (but no one is worth more than another)) off into the world of real science. Such as, “unless it is recently published it is useless”.  This is pure egotism fueled by the explosion of public-written, self published articles, immediate dissemination of text and images (fact and alternative fact).

There is a wealth of information, old, dusty, archived, well thought out science (and history)– the trick is not to trade it in for new, spiffy, swirrling color data without first checking it out.