The Search for E.T. Continues...

As it happens I have the time, the energy and the will to resume my blog, so I’m coming back to this. What better way to begin again than to talk about SPACE!

So pretty

NASA always has interesting news, even if its just interesting to me. Of note are two news bits from extraplanetary probes, the Mars Curiosity Rover and the Messenger satellite. The Curiosity rover turned heads when the lead scientist announced they may have found something that would be ‘one for the history books’ only to renege on said statement. What was found was complex chemistry with carbon in it (methyl chloride to be precise) but the exact origin of these compounds, and whether they’re of martian origin, is still up for debate. The current theory is that carbon from the rover reacted with choride in the martian soil, forming what is is technically an organic compound, but nothing groundbreaking.... Like what was found on Mercury by the Messenger probe

Much more noteworthy than a martian false alarm is the discovery of almost 1 trillion metric tons of ice from 50 cm to 20 meters deep on Mercury. For context that’s 1100 cubic kilometers (around 260 cubic miles) of ice this is roughly the same size as the Arctic ice cap . The ice is kept safe in the permanently shadowed poles of Mercury which never receive sunlight due to the planets almost perfectly vertical axis. Some of this ice is exposed and remains as -223 degrees Celsius (that's -370 Fahrenheit), but more interestingly there’s ice where there shouldn’t be, in fairly warm areas above the freezing point. Ice here appears to be insulator by ‘strange dark insulator’ that does seem to be comprised of a complex mix of  organic compounds (including amino acids sugars and proteins), the building blocks of life. Scientists at NASA were quick to say that life on mercury was a long shot, but the data gives hope that life might be found in even the most extreme circumstances outside of Earth and that the universe is a much soggier place than originally expected.

So why the big hunt for water and organic compounds? Organic compounds make sense, we’re made from long chain carbon compounds, and its unlikely that life would choose another method to base itself from. Carbon can form long complex chains, the closest thing to carbon chemically is silicon, but silcon doesn’t form long complex chains. Any silicon based life would be simple, if possible at all. Silicon is a more common element on earth than carbon is, so presumably if it were possible or sustainable it would’ve likely been done.

So why water? Water is often said to be the key component to life, but it’s seldom explained why. Water is an ionic mixture so it can hold many different compounds, salts and other metals, and more importantly it can hold some organic compounds in suspension. Water acts as a solvent, so it can act as a bridge helping various compounds react with eachother, and given it's ionic nature it keeps predominently nonpolar molecules (i.e. most organic molecules) close together, close enough so that they can react and do the processes required for life to occur. Almost every animal, plant and microbe on the planet has it, even when the environment would dictate that it’s not feasible. Liquid water’s scarcity in the universe however brings up questions of other solvents, like ammonia, would be possible.

The search for life is ultimately a search to try and understand the universe. Are we special snowflakes, an oddity in an otherwise lifeless void. Are we perhaps the most intelligent lifeform out there? Or are we just one among many.

One way or another we will find out. I personally hope it’s sooner rather than later

Weight Loss: The Honest Truth

I've been using a lot of colons lately: colons are awesome. So that's alright

With Thanksgiving imminent, looming and inevitable weight gain is upon us. As such, the public consciousness goes into precisely how to get rid of the 'turkey weight', diets begin to spring out of the woodwork: the Atkins diet, the Caveman Diet, South Beach Diet, Mediterranean Diet, Liquid Diet, the Cookie Diet, Dye it diet and the Di tit diet (the last two are fake). This is even including the latest news article that touches on a very plain truth.

The news story going through the media lately has been that Mark Haub, professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University lost 27 pounds (around 12.25 kg) in ten weeks eating only Hostess and Little Debbie snacks once every three hours. Not only that but his LDL cholesterol and triglycerides went down, while protective HDL cholesterol (the good kind) went up.

So what's the take away here? Does this fly in the face of all of the conventional wisdom about diets? Do Twinkies have some hidden health benefits? Do I love asking rhetorical questions?

No, big no, and yes.

Very simply, take in less energy than you use. And since energy and mass are connected (see equation to the right) you will therefore lose mass, this is fundamental physics we're talking about here, regardless of the newest fad. Dr. Haub in total consumed about 1,800 calories as a day versus the 2,600 he consumed before. In taking in less energy (and that is what a calorie is, a unit of energy) he could no longer support the same amount of mass, thus losing weight (most likely fat AND muscle). About 3,500 kcal (kilocalories... which is frequently abbreviated to simply cal for most calculations) is required to lose one pound of body fat. Getting rid of 800 kcal a day for 70 days (10 weeks) represents a calorie deficit of 56,000 kcal. That would be enough to account for a loss of 16 pounds of body fat (56,000/3,500=16)

As for his cholesterol changes, this could just be a side effect of losing weight again, as losing fat overall will make one lose cholesterol in the blood stream, even with the rather fattening substances entering his body.

However as Haub himself is quick to point out, this is NOT a diet to follow. While it is possible to lose weight with Little Debbie and Hostess products, the long term affects are less than advantageous. I'm going to use the Twinkie as an example, for no other reason than it's gotten the most press out of this, and it's fun to say. As we can see from the nutrition facts, (found via the Hostess Website) the common Twinkie is not in fact, that bad for you in terms of pure caloric intake. However, the amount of fat and saturated fat is pretty high. Add that there is no fiber, no protein, and no appreciable amount of any vitamins, except iron, will very quickly lead a person to SEVERE malnutrition.

The stomach itself does not recognize 'calories taken in', it is rather based solely on volume that it determines whether one is full or not. This is the basis behind surgeries like stomach stapling, limiting the amount of food one eats before becoming full.  This is why low calorie things like vegetables, whole grain, lean meats and fruit are important, you will lose weight, get all the necessary amount of vitamins and minerals (which will help weight loss) and will make you feel full.... Something I imagine one Twinkie every three hours would be unable to do.

That and exercise. As said, if you use more energy than you consume, you lose mass.... Works even better when you increase the energy you use while decreasing the energy you consume. Of course sometimes you get hungry BECAUSE you exercise but that gets into a fun recursive loop

So there you have it. It's not especially sexy, nor is it particularly complicated. It is, however hard work...Perhaps that's why we don't get the straight truth about it...

Though I have heard about this new one called the News Diet... You watch the news and feel nauseous, so you don't WANT to eat. I have high hopes for it.

Thanks for reading as always,

Mick

A Species in Decline: Sperm

Got your attention? Good.

A warning, this is one of my...less family friendly posts.  
Viewer discretion advised

Now, onward

So this isn't about the so called 'War on Men'. This is, simply put, about how our current methods of business (and life really) aren't particularly friendly to the little swimmers. Chemicals of all sorts (whether intentionally taken in or not) and environment are detrimental to the little fellas. As with most phenomena that occur in life,  multiple reasons lie behind it.

Firstly, even at the best of circumstances, a man's sperm has only 50-70% viability due to the process...that is why males have literally millions at any one time, sort of a quantity over quality production process. For an explanation of 'environment' the thing I am referring to in this case are laptops. Sperm exist best about 2 degrees Celsius below body temperature (so 35 degrees, or 94.8 F, about 4 degrees below body temperature in Fahrenheit). The body itself is fairly good at maintaining this temperature, and has many means in place to keep it at this temperature. Anything above or below this temp results in a decrease in sperm production or killing the sperm period, which is a problem because it takes 72 days to produce a single sperm. Now, why bring this up? The increased use of laptops. A study done at Cornell in 2007 showed that the average laptop user's lap can reach 105 degrees Fahrenheit, well above what is ideal. As a result, males who use laptops in the study were shown to have a smaller sperm count than the norm.

So, just put a laptop on a table right? Problem solved. Wrong. This is merely one of the many things that's killing off the little guys. So let's hit the next thing I discussed: Diet

The average male American takes in about 250 mg of caffeine a day. And most Americans (and most of the world) have a solid caffeine addiction. Caffeine has several known side effects (dehydration, possible impairment of memory and heart problems) but a study in Copenhagen has found another: decreasing sperm count. The study finds that, with Cola specifically, it can decrease your sperm count up to 30% if you drink up to a liter of soda. Now a liter sounds like a lot all at once, however statistics have shown that the average American drinks about 216 liters over the course of a year, so every day the average American drinks approximately .6 liters of soda a day, enough to skill affect the little guys.

It should come as little surprise that alcohol and tobacco, especially in conjunction, have been know to limit sperm count. Unlike alcohol and tobacco, however, there is little evidence that a heightened BMI decreases sperm count, in spite of my rants about the subject. At the other end of the scale, a 'healthy' food can also cause of lowered sperm counts as well.What I'm speaking of is soy products. While a reasonably healthy alternate method to get protein, soy products contain isoflavones, a type of phytoestrogens. Phytoestrogens, as the name implies, act much like estrogen in the body.As a result the male body responds to it in kind, down-regulating the production of male hormones needed to produce sperm, specifically if consumed during childhood when such chemical interference can interfere in the later years.


Now for the REALLY fun one.

What is the biggest scam of the twentieth and twenty-first century? Survey says.... Bottled water! Ignoring the fact that most bottled water does not in fact come from a spring but from a tap (if you're lucky its filtered at some point), there is another rather frightening fact about the stuff.

The bottles have chemicals that leech into the water. These chemicals are called xenoestrogens and are found in most plastic bottles. Much like phytoestrogens as above, when they enter the body they act very much like estrogen, down-regulating male processes (and causing girls to develop more at a younger age).

One specific chemical is called Bisphenol-A (or BPA). BPA is used widely to make plastic harder and watertight tin cans. It is found in most food and drink cans ( including tins of infant formula milk), plastic food containers, and the casings of mobile phones and other electronic goods. It's often referred to as a 'gender bending chemical' and has been linked to increased male infertility. And is toxic in its own right.

BPA

Of course pollution and malnutrition also are common factors towards a decreased sperm count as well.

So what do we come to with all these factors? Is infertility on the rise? Recent studies are saying the answer is... yes some places. In the US, signs seem to point to no, though the topic has become far more prominent, causing a perceived increase in infertility due to a larger public awareness. At least that's the answer so far, without taking into account the many new chemicals flooding the market

Abroad though, for example in China and Britain,  there seems to be a greater indication that infertility is beginning to become a greater problem. For both of these locations there has been a great deal of pollution, as well as an increase in the use of other substances described above

Death by SNOO SNOO!

So what now? Do we think that men will slowly die off, leaving women to rule the earth, searching for men to trade as currency to trade about?

Probably not.

What's more likely is that industrialized nations will continue to have smaller populations while 'third world' nations will continue to balloon up in population. This is exacerbated by industrialized nations having fewer children per couple by choice anyhow. That and the phrase 'third world nation' is becoming an ever increasing misnomer these days anyhow (TED talks are awesome)

The really fun bit is I know some guys who will take these stats as advice to get their sperm count lower...

Can't WAIT to see the ads that pop up with this one

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A few other things, we broke over 100 views this month! Woo
And also, as you can see I did some editing of the overall layout. Look good?

Thanks for reading,

Mick

The Lies of Thanksgiving: Tryptophan

In a world, filled with corruption (and stuffing), one man looks to peel back the lies and deceit of this holiday season. In my quest for truth about this holiday season I have stumbled upon the BIGGEST CONSPIRACY since the invention of the aglet (for their purpose is sinister indeed). I stared at the radio, the television, the internet, all feeding me the same horrific lie:

Possibly the best picture I've ever found

Turkey makes you sleepy

I knew the truth, I had to tell it to the world. But I knew THEY would try to stop me. THEY, the old wives tales and embedded ideas of the past that led people astray. I needed to show the truth, to uncover....The Lies of Thanksgiving!

Cue title drop

Yeah, I'm getting weirder... Anyway.

So we hear the same thing every year: its Tryptophan in turkey that makes one sleepy during this gluttonous holiday.

This is, of course, Grade A bull. The truth isn't that simple, and doesn't fit into a single line like "Tryptophan in Turkey causes sleep". There is another reason for sleep, that is directly correlated to this holiday.

Before I get into the details of why, let's first talk about Tryptophan and what it is

What we're talking about: pretty isn't it?

Tryptophan is an amino acid, which, for those of you who don't know, are the building blocks of proteins and enzymes within the body. Tryptophan is one of several amino acids that is 'essential'. In other words we cannot produce these amino acids on our own, we have to take them in through protein (meat, beans, seeds etc...). This is also true of about half of all amino acids (the other half are either produced from amino acids, or are made via other mechanisms).

Firstly, tryptophan is not the most common amino acid within protein. There simply just isn't that much there. I've attached a brief graph below

And I made it myself too!

As you can see, while Tryptophan IS present in turkey, it is no more so than, say beef, chicken or pork, all of which are of comparable content. So then, why do we not associate eating meat (or eggs, or seeds) with being drowsy?

Serotonin and melatonin pathway from Tryptophan

There is some truth behind the myth, Tryptophan is used to produce serotonin. Serotonin is a well known contributor for 'well being' and being 'calm', and in fact an abundance of the stuff WILL make you fall asleep, so there is some credence to this myth. Eating turkey on turkey day WILL make you content and happier. Which is good because the opposing force of your family will try to bring you down.

In fact, serotonin is a very important little chemical, as its deficiency has been linked with sudden infant death syndrome, as well as depression. As a result, it is used as an anti-depressant and will make you fall asleep in high enough dosages... but not the dosage we're talking about when it comes to turkey.

Sleep itself is a complex mechanism, associated with many different chemical neurotransmitters. This includes Melatonin, which also is synthesized from Tryptophan. Melatonin itself does not actually 'cause' sleep. It has far too many other uses in the body as an antioxidant and for the immune system. Another of the key chemicals (and one many people know about) committed to sleep is dopamine, which isn't made from Tryptophan at all but instead from another amino acid called Tyrosine (which turkey, again, has about an average level of).

No, in fact the turkey itself has little to do with why we find ourselves in a veritable coma while watching football (bonus points for  Detroit Lions game "watchers"). The cause is actually the sheer amount of food that we eat. Thanksgiving is, after all, perhaps the most gluttonous holiday of the year

This occurrence is called Postprandial somnolence or, as it's more commonly called, a food coma. This is caused by two things: a lowered state of energy, and general sleepiness caused by neurochemical and hormonal changes in the body, related to the rate glucose (what we get energy from) enters the body.


So let's break this down.


When you eat a lot of food and it hits your stomach and small intestine, it causes a shift in your body's priorities. The activity in your sympathetic nervous system (which controls eyes, heart lungs etc) is down regulated while the activity in your parasympathetic nervous system (which controls the glands and organ for digestion) is up regulated. This shift results in the body being at lower energy and having a desire to rest. The bigger the meal, the more this affects the subject.

In addition, when eating foods with a high glycemic index (so something high in carbs), glucose is absorbed rapidly in the digestive tract and then sent into the blood stream. For people without diabetes, this then sends a massive burst of insulin out to try and keep the blood glucose levels maintained. The sudden burst of insulin induces many other non-charged amino acids to be taken into the muscles...except for tryptophan. This lowers the ratio of these other amino acids in the bloodstream to tryptophan, making tryptophan more preferable to cross the blood brain barrier. Once inside the brain, tryptophan indeed becomes serotonin and melatonin. The increase of both of these substances in the brain directly correlates with sleepiness and can be measured. But correlation does not equate to causation. The serotonin and melatonin levels result from overeating, not the the quantities of tryptophan in the turkey

So, there we have it. The Tryptophan in the turkey is not the trigger that makes people tired. It is the amount of carbohydrates and sheer amount of food consumed that does it.

Thanks for reading,

Mick

Have a good, restful, Turkey Day

Fanservice!

Vampires! And why Garlic is your best friend

I am back boys and girls and ready to go for this blog. Though I'm sure it's mostly self indulgent for me I will still continue to post, even if my audience is an assortment of friends and family (thanks by the way!)

So today I'm going to go over Vampirism.











No, not that guy. Too classy












No not him. Far too many redeeming characteristics










Oh hell no.

No no what I'm talking about today are the real blood suckers of the world, creatures that practice hematophagy. I am of course speaking of the typical annoying pests that come to mind, mosquitoes, lice, fleas, ticks, Edward Cullen, lawyers, leeches all of them share the same urge to drink blood. Now why is that?

Well first lets go over what blood (human blood for simplicity's sake) is made of. What we call 'blood' are in fact red and white blood cells suspended in plasma. The plasma itself is approximately 91% water, providing the necessary water for any given organism, and contains dissolved proteins, glucose, carbon dioxide, mineral elements, hormones, platelets and the blood cells themselves. The most abundant cell in blood is of course the red blood cell which carries oxygen using a heme group.

Now looking over this list, it becomes pretty apparent that blood is pretty nutritious and would satisfy many creatures in their search for water, protein, minerals etc... In fact the Maasai of Tanzania actually drink blood straight from their cattle, offering further proof of its inherently nutritious, if slightly off-putting, nature.

So we've established why these little bloodsuckers...well suck blood. For creatures adapted to get it it is a constantly renewed resource (in fact a reason for feces to be brown is its coloration by red blood cells, so every day blood cells are vacated and replaced). They are however, almost universally considered to be pests at best. More often, however they are considered dangerous as (mosquitoes and fleas specifically) have been known to carry many different kinds of deadly diseases such as Lime disease, West Nile virus, among others.

Now, back to the whole Halloween theme here.



Commonly held mythology states that garlic repels vampires. I always thought that was odd. Crosses I understood, assuming Vampires were strictly demonic, but garlic always puzzled me. It seems though that our mythology is teaching us a lesson. Garlic does in fact prevent mosquitoes as well as other bloodsucking creatures. The reasons for this are many. Firstly, mosquitoes don't really have an olfactory sense like you or I have, they only smell a very narrow range of scents, most specifically a sweet scent. As a result of garlic's rather pungent smell (caused by a relatively high concentration of diallyl disulfide) covers the scent to mosquitoes and allows the person to get by unbitten. Thanks to convergent evolution, many other creatures share the same kind of ability to find their next meal. In addition garlic possesses the chemical allicin, which is garlic's natural defense mechanism against pests anyhow. So in effect having garlic or eating garlic makes you have poison in your veins to the parasites, and makes you smell bad to them (and your significant other)

Keep this in mind folks, as bed bugs and fleas are running rampant this time of the year. A good cheap way to deal with them is to make them not want to bite you

Thanks for reading

Mick

The Next Potential Pandemic of Paranoia

Alliteration, good stuff.

Globalization is a marvelous thing. We can literally circumnavigate the world in perhaps a day, we can talk to people around the world in an instant. Information, technology, ideas, culture, all of these things can be exchanged and and truly makes humanity seem closer to 'the human race' as opposed to 'white, black, chinese, indian, etc... The unfortunate side effect of this

So you will recall my article about swine flu. Based on its genetic structure and other factors, it was unlikely to have been a serious threat save to people with compromised immune systems. It simply did not have the genetic pedigree to be a 'killer'. That in combination with a quick government response and a general paranoia about getting sick effectively cut off the disease before it could take hold and further mutate into something more deadly. This is all a moot point of course as most experts agree that we as humanity are severely overdue for a massive pandemic that would kill many people...

In case you guys thought swine flu was gone by the way, cases have popped up in India. Witha death toll reaching as high as 29. Much like many other kinds of diseases, once it comes to light it is still with us forever more. Even the Bubonic plague, otherwise known as the Black Death, which killed off a solid third of the world's population, still exists today in isolated pockets, particularly in the American Southwest.

Speaking of forgotten pandemics. Does anyone remember bird flu? Those few months were whenever we saw a dead bird we skirted away...and when chicken breasts suddenly became much cheaper? That strain is still around traveling between birds. Scientists are trying to track it and its evolution, though how well that will work is still open for debate. Just to be sure, and of course increase paranoia, scientists have created a new strain of Bird flu thats much more virulent in humans (however they did it in such a way as would be doable, viable, even probable in non-lab conditions). These viruses are changing and evolving rapidly, such that neither our immune system, nor our use of antibiotics, can keep up with them. Pleasant dreams

I meanwhile will be eating peanuts at the bar, and trying to breath in coughs, as well as shaking hands with people and generally trying to be a social entity. Since with most illnesses you have to have direct exposure.

It will be FOR SCIENCE after all.

In other news, there's officially a minifridge that gets close to absolute zero....where was this when I needed a cold beer right away?

Tetris with Proteins

Life is messy.

An Example of Entropy

Very rarely in nature is there a straight line, or a single element. Life is messy, things mix, combine, bend and knot. The universe favors lower energy states, higher order systems require energy to be put in for them to work. As a result thingsare seldom ever neat and tidy. This is true of society, my bedroom, and of much smaller scale things, including DNA, RNA and proteins.


DNA, made famous for it's double helix formation, has even greater structure, going into tertiary and even quarternary structural units. The same is true of RNA and perhaps more importantly, proteins. Why is a protein important over DNA and RNA for it's form? DNA and RNA are, ultimately, blueprints for the body. Their structure is a result of what is easiest and lowest energy formation (caused because of negative charges, hydrophobicity etc...).






Proteins however can derive their function solely based on their shape, forming enzymes or otherwise. If a protein has an incorrect structure it will not react properly, and other biologic functions would not work, making the processes essential to life nealy impossible. As such outside of indentifying the constituent parts of the protein, another important aspect is determining it's structure. This is typically done using a Rosetta program via computer to determine the best possible arrangement of amino acids. The Rosetta program does well, except it does get stuck, as in getting to a lower energy state, sometimes you must cross through a higher energy one, causing the program to stop

So why am I going over protein structure and entropy? Much like the jellyfish article, I found another that was weird enough to catch my attention.


Protein folding is now a MMO game.

The use of the sorting algorthm is still invaluable, as the proteins can be several thousand amino acids long. However reaching the ending point of the program, researchers decided to make a game out of it, giving the virtual proteins to an online community to solve, getting points for making the protein have a lower and lower energy required. While algorthms and computer programs are extremely useful in science, human beings are definitely still needed... so screw you H.A.L.

The same tactic has begun to be used by astonomers and in other fields


I'm hoping in the future a biochem degree will boil down to a giant video game.