Exercising in the Heat May Improve Athletic Performance in Cool and Hot Conditions, Study Suggests

A recent study conducted by human physiology researchers at the University of Oregon has shown the influence that becoming accustomed to heat has on athletic performance in both hot and cold atmospheres. Using the results from experiments on highly trained cyclists of both genders, scientists came to the conclusion that “heat acclimation exposure provided considerable ergogenic benefits in cool conditions, in addition to the expected performance benefits in the hot environment.” This study differed from previous ones in that it assessed the effect of high temperatures on aerobic performance in cool weather. These findings are actually very relevant to today’s competitive sports world, as athletes can possibly use the method of heat exposure to increase the quality of how they perform in cool conditions. This approach works because, when the body is accustomed to high temperatures, the body can better control its temperature, improving sweating and increasing blood flow. It also heightens blood volume so the heart can distribute more blood to organs, muscles, and skin. According to Santiago Lorenzo, a researcher who studied at the University of Oregon and now trains at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, heat acclimation makes more sense than the widely-used strategy of living at a high altitude and training at a low altitude, being “easier to apply” and leading to “more robust physiological adaptations.” Researchers also discovered that heat may cause enzymatic alteration which could improve the work done by the muscle during exercise.

I thoroughly enjoyed this article, as I found the topic very interesting. However, I would have liked to learn more about the actual explanation of why heat acclimation improves athletic performance in cool conditions. There was only about one paragraph on this, and I thought it should have made up a much larger portion of the article. The majority of the article was spent sighting specific researchers and specific tests that were conducted; a more general discussion of the conclusions that were drawn and the reasons behind those conclusions, I felt, would have better served the reader. In addition, the article could have been improved by going deeper into how the findings impact today’s sports and the training techniques of today’s athletes.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101025161144.htm

A Redeeming Role for a Common Virus

            Researches at the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, a part of Georgetown University Medical Center have recently discovered that a common virus could have the ability to eliminate tumors.

Reovirus, which causes coughing and diarrhea, is a very common virus and by the age of five most people have experienced it; some people experience the symptoms, while others aren’t affected. The body generally overpowers the virus, so it does little harm to people. However, scientists have uncovered that this virus grows like a “gangbuster” inside of tumors, with a malfunction that causes tumor growth. Therefore, scientists question whether this virus could actually have a healing affect.

In order to test the Reovirus’s ability, scientists have genetically altered the virus so that it can’t grow inside of healthy cells. Instead, “What's left is a virus in search of a host, and reovirus loves the environment inside a specific kind of cancer cell.”  KRAS and EGFR are two kinds of cancer cells that have a malfunctioning machinery mutation. These mutations in these cells allow the virus to takeover; the virus then shuts down the cells machinery and doesn’t allow it to replicate itself.

This research would allow scientists to eliminate a certain kind of cancer due to the kinds of cancer cells in tumors. Subramaniam says, “This is a subset of cancer where we haven't had many successes in terms of finding drugs that extend life after diagnosis.” Therefore, this new hypothesis is very exciting for scientists to experiment. 

submitted by N. Carpenter

http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2010/10/20/a_redeeming_role_for_a_common_virus.html

Feeling Sad Makes Us More Creative

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/feeling-sad-makes-us-more-creative/

Sadness Linked to Smarts

Creativity and depression have gone hand in hand. There have been many accounts of depressed artists who have created brilliant works in their bouts of depression. Classic examples are Van Gogh and the thinkers such as Aristotle and Plato. This correlation has scientific backing. Modupe Akinola, a professor at Columbia Business School conducted experiments on these “down” emotions and their correlation with creativity. The experiment used positive and negative feedback and at the end, the patients were asked to produce a creative work. At the end of the experiment, these pieces of work were analyzed by artists for their creativity. Patients who received negative feedback often created better artwork. Columbia University is not the only institute finding correlations between the two unlikely factors. Joe Forgas of the University of South Wales in Australia believes that sad and angst states create a mindset that is better for dealing with demanding situations. He has found that sad people recall past events better and make fewer arithmetic mistakes. Awareness and attentiveness were also increased. Feelings do have an affect on our ability to create thoughts. While sadness may increase diligence, happiness has an opposite effect. Happiness can dull a person’s awareness and perceptions. In more depth, sadness affects a person’s attention span and focus. Creativity comes with an ability of relentless focus. It’s simply easier to achieve this focus when a person isn’t happy. The quality of work a person produces increases when they are sad. Kay Redfield Jamison of Johns Hopkins found a correlation between success and depressive mental illness. Emotions affect the way we think.
This article gives insight into how emotions dictate our way of thinking. Human beings are emotional creatures. It is often rare to see emotion completely eliminated from our thoughts and decisions. While we may not be able to make more rational decisions, people should understand how emotions affect them. Emotions such as sadness have an effect on creativity and attention. If this is true other emotions must also have an effect on us as well. Understanding the state of mind we think with and increasing awareness of our actions is important for any person. I chose this article personally because I was interested to see how emotion and creativity are correlated. I read the article expecting the opposite of what was stated and came out more informed. My perceptions were that sadness would detrimentally affect a person’s creativity. This article gives perspective to our emotions.
The article was easy to read and was written for the common person. It would have been interesting to see more of the scientific reasons behind these correlations. In addition, more in depth examples of sadness and creativity would have been appreciated. The article gives a good summary of how everyday perceptions are affected. The article could have been more informative if it gave more information on specific activities. If specific examples were evaluated such as playing an instrument or painting, the article would have been more informative and insightful. The experiments conducted in the research were also subjective. Emotions were incited through comments, music and weather. These emotions are subjective and can create different effects for different people. More scientific and controlled experiments would give more creditability to the article.
The article was a well written, easy to read article on how sadness affects our thoughts. The insights into sadness should help future scientists learn more about our emotions.

Lehrer, Jonah. "Feeling Sad Makes Us More Creative." WIRED. Conde Nast Digital 2010. Web. 19 Oct. 2010. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/feeling-sad-makes-us more-creative

'Botox: Not just for wrinkles anymore'

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39507650/ns/health-skin_and_beauty/

“By breaking down Botox molecules into two separate building blocks, Davletov's team was able to produce them separately and safely, and then "clip" them back together again, they said in a report of work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal.” In London, these British scientists experimented with new ways of building the molecules in anti-wrinkle products like Botox. Botox is also used for Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy, and chronic migraines. This new developments of Clostridium botulinum (Botox), may be used as long-term painkillers. Safer products will allow more economical production of Botox-based medicines to be sold. The toxins in Botox allow more unwanted effects to occur, while this new method gets rid of. Britain became the first country in the world to approve Botox by Allergan as a treatment for Migraines, but it is very dangerous and toxic and can only be used in small doses. “Davletov said the new refining technique could allow scientists to produce new forms of Botox with wider practical medicinal uses, for example as a long-term painkiller. The method could potentially allow researchers to develop a form of chronic pain relief, which could last as long as a single Botox injection -- around four to six months, he said.”


This article was very well written, and I enjoyed learning more about the new studies of Botox. I knew that it was used as a “wrinkle eraser” but I never knew it could be used as a painkiller. The article was informative, concise, and was straight to the point, which I enjoyed.

New Planet May Be Able to Nurture Organisms

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/science/space/30planet.html?_r=1&ref=science

Dennis Overbye’s article “New Planet May Be Able to Nurture Organisms” discusses the recent discovery that the planet Gliese 581g is capable of harboring water and therefore life as well. In 2009 a satellite was launched as a way to detect Earth-like planets. The planet they discovered not long after, however, is 20 light-years away in the constellation Libra and there is still more research that needs to be done before they can prove there is water there. Gliese 581g is in the “Goldilocks zone,” which means the heat from the star it orbits is not too hot or too cold for water to be present in liquid form. Two other planets that were thought to be capable of harboring water were found orbiting the same dim star as Gliese 581g, but then one proved to be too hot while the other was too cold. Given Gliese 581g’s prime location scientists involved in researching the planet, believe that there is a 90-100% chance that there is water and life on the planet. Astronomers and scientists still need to find out more about the density, composition, and atmosphere of the planet before they can come to any conclusions though. Given how quickly they discovered this planet, astronomers think Earth-like planets are more common than we initially believed, and they are going to keep searching.

This discovery may not have a huge impact on society now, but it will in the future. As technology becomes more advanced, people may be able to travel to these distant planets. It is possible that we could discover other species and ecosystems there. As we continue to find Earth-like planets, we could even discover planets that are as developed as Earth is. Also, because the population is continuously growing, if we can find ways to transport humans to other planets, we could hypothetically free up space on Earth by relocating people to communities on other planets. The possibilities are endless. Right now though, this discovery is changing the way we think. For so long we have believed that Earth was the only place for living things, but not anymore. This finding is opening up a whole new world and way of thinking, and it is starting a new era of discovery.

I wish the author had discussed the type of life they would expect to find on Gliese 581g and said more on how they were going to continue the exploration process. The article consists of a lot of quotes and opinions, but I would prefer to read about the science behind the discovery. Overbye mentions the satellite that was launched to detect Earth-like planets, but not how it detects them. I would also like to know more about how density, atmosphere, and composition impact whether or not life could exist on Gliese 581g. Overbye states that the satellite was launched in 2009, but that it took eleven years to find Gliese 581g, which is confusing. Plus, you would think it would take more than one year for the satellite to detect a planet 20 light-years away. Also, if the author should have defined certain terms, like “exoplanet.”

Precambrian Era Yields Oldest Animal Fossils

Princeton scientists may have discovered the oldest fossils of animal bodies, suggesting that sponge-like creatures were living in ocean reefs about 650 million years ago. The shelly fossils, found beneath a 635-million-year-old glacial deposit in South Australia, represent the earliest evidence of animal body forms in the current fossil record by at least 70 million years. Princeton geosciences professor Adam Maloof and graduate student Catherine Rose happened upon the new fossils while working on a project focused on the severe ice age that marked the end of the Cryogenian period 635 million years ago. Their findings, published in the Aug. 17 issue of the journal Nature Geosciences, provide the first direct evidence that animal life existed before — and probably survived — the severe "snowball Earth" event known as the Marinoan glaciation that left much of the globe covered in ice at the end of the Cryogenian. When they began the digital reconstruction process, the shape of some of the two-dimensional slices made the researchers suspect they might be dealing with the previously discovered Namacalathus, a goblet-shaped creature featuring a long body stalk topped with a hollow ball. But their model revealed irregularly shaped, centimeter-scale animals with a network of internal canals. After considering a variety of alternatives, the researchers decided that the fossil organisms most closely resembled sponges — simple filter-feeding animals that extract food from water as it flows through channels within their bodies. Previously, the oldest known undisputed fossilized sponges were about 520 million years old, dating to the Cambrian Period.
But evidence has suggested that sponges appeared on the scene much earlier in Earth history. For example, scientists have conducted detailed analyses of genetic material in a wide range of organisms to create "molecular clocks" that suggest how long ago the various types of organisms evolved. According to these clocks, sponges existed millions of years before the Cambrian. This has been supported by the relatively recent discovery of lipid biomarkers — essentially, traces of recalcitrant fats that resist degradation over millions of years — in sedimentary rocks from Oman of nearly the same age as those studied by the Maloof group in Australia.

Tug of War Pits Genes of Parents in the Fetus

     This article discusses the equal role that genes from a mother and father play in the genetic make-up of their offspring. Scientists have been aware for some time that around one hundred, of what they call, imprinted genes, existed. The process of imprinting, in which a copy of a particular gene from either the mother or father is inactivated, accounts for asymmetry of maternal versus paternal genes in a fetus. An example of imprinting is found in the case of the gene, insulinlike growth factor-2, which promotes fetus growth. These gene is inactive in the genome the fetus receives from its mother, but active in the genome from the father. The explanation for this is that a mother is going to give birth to many fetuses in her life time, and her interest lies in equally distributing her resources to all of her children. The father on the other hand is only interested in the survival of his one child because the other children the female gives birth to may have different fathers. Thus, the female does not have enough insulinlike growth factor-2 to distribute to all her offspring, so that gene is imprinted in females. Just last month however, Christopher Gregg and Catherine Dulac of Harvard found evidence that nearly 1,300 imprinted genes exist, which is about 1% of a human genome. In order to come to this conclusion, these scientists tracked the transcription of recognizably different male and female DNA sequences in mice. They found many unexpected imprinted genes and an abundance of active maternal genes in the brain of an embryo in comparison to the abundance of active paternal genes in an adult brain. Another pattern they found was that there were sex differences of the specific imprinted genes in certain regions of the brain. These differences may provide a mechanism by which nature chooses the sex of the fetus. The general conclusion that this article came to was that there is, “a conflict of interest” between the maternal and paternal genes in a fetus which can lead to asymmetrical sharing of genes.

     The observations and explanations revealed in this article will have a large impact on humanity. For example, this may lead to the discovery of causes of autism and other such diseases as disastrous results could occur if one copy of a gene was mutated and the other was inactive. They also might lead to the unearthing of explanations for sexual differences and psychiatric diseases. If we can locate the site of the genetic differences that cause autism, multiple sclerosis, and others, hopefully scientists and medical researchers will be able to find cures or means to prevent these diseases.

     This article did an excellent job of providing background information for the newly published research it is discussing. I knew nothing about imprinted genes, but after reading this article I was able to thoroughly discuss both the recent findings, what led to these discoveries, and the impact they will have in the future. Something that the author should have done differently is to better organize the information. I found that in my attempt to summarize the article, I was searching it from top to bottom in order to make sure that I had all the information I needed for one point before moving on to the next. The article would be much more coherent if it was not broken down into so many paragraphs because they are often discussing the same topic but it takes the reader some time to realize that because of the break in the text.

Bibliography

Wade, Nicholas. "Tug of War Pits Genes of Parents in the Fetus." New York Times 13 Sept. 2010, Science sec. The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. Web. 04 Oct. 2010.  

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/health/14gene.html?_r=1&sq=&st=nyt&scp=5&pagewanted=all