“Spotlight: From the gift of a microscope, a life’s work - Daily Iowan” plus 3 more |
- Spotlight: From the gift of a microscope, a life’s work - Daily Iowan
- Another change taking place at Walden Pond - Boston Globe
- Cocaine or ecstasy consumption during adolescence increases risk of ... - EurekAlert
- Exploring the characteristics of viscoelastic fluids - PhysOrg
| Spotlight: From the gift of a microscope, a life’s work - Daily Iowan Posted: 04 Feb 2010 06:04 AM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. Spotlight: From the gift of a microscope, a life's work
 Where there's smoke, there's… science? That sounds unlikely, but for biology Professor Joseph Frankel, it was a pack of cigarettes that sparked a deep-seated passion he continues today. In 1947 in Germany, a friend of Frankel's father traded a pack of smokes for an old microscope, brought the instrument back to the United States, and gave it to an eager 12-year-old Frankel. "I went out to local ponds, and looked at single-cell organisms, and studied them," the 74-year-old said. "And then decided I really wanted to go into biology." It's been more than 60 years since then, and Frankel, originally from Vienna, Austria, is still enjoying his life as a professor and researcher at the UI. Even after 47 years of teaching biology, he still finds innovative ways to educate his students, thanks to a continually evolving field. "There is one advantage to teaching biology over, say, teaching calculus or physics," he said, sitting at his desk next to four tanks of liquid nitrogen — used to preserve his research organisms. "And that is that biology is such a young science. New discoveries are being made all the time." A colleague of his, Professor John Menninger, has been working with Frankel since 1973, and the two collaborate on the curriculum for the biology department. Menninger said he has a great deal of respect for Frankel, especially his dedication to the seminar aspect of teaching. "He's one of the most thorough readers and attentive listeners of biology seminars," he said. "He's the quintessential biology teacher." And when Frankel isn't using those notes to improve his Principles of Biology II class, he is focused on his research, which specializes in protozoa — single-cell organisms — and using random mutations to alter the genetics of the cell to analyze how its structures are organized. He hopes such endeavors will assist future scientists, he said. But lecturing huge classes and performing research can take its toll on almost any educator. However, Frankel — who studied at Cornell and Yale University — welcomes the challenge. "The demands of teaching are greater," he said. "You have to maintain websites, check up on students for plagiarism, all sorts of things. But it's good that the demands of teaching are greater, because we have to pay more attention to our students." His continued devotion is reflected in the students he has taught. UI graduate student Karen Thompson, a teaching assistant for Frankel's biology class, once even had him as a professor, too. "He has a deep passion and really explains things well," she said. "Energetic sums him up pretty well." The still young-at-heart Frankel has a lot of years to look back on. "You never get everything you want in life," he said. "My goal was to be at a large research university, in a small town, and near the mountains. I got two out of three." comments powered by Disqus Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Another change taking place at Walden Pond - Boston Globe Posted: 04 Feb 2010 07:09 AM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. The new work, published last month in the journal PLoS ONE, builds on a 2008 study that found that as the climate has warmed, the number of buttercups, orchids, roses, violets, dogwoods, and lilies has decreased in Thoreau's woods. Plants are flowering earlier, and those that do not shift their flowering time have decreased greatly. The researchers found that 27 percent of the species Thoreau documented have been lost locally, and that 36 percent are in danger of disappearing from the woods. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Cocaine or ecstasy consumption during adolescence increases risk of ... - EurekAlert Posted: 04 Feb 2010 07:09 AM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. ![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](http://www.eurekalert.org/images/back2e.gif){kind=small} Public release date: 4-Feb-2010[ | E-mail |  Share ] Contact: SINC Exposure to ecstasy or cocaine during adolescence increases the "reinforcing effects" that make people vulnerable to developing an addiction. This is the main conclusion of a research team from the University of Valencia (UV), which has shown for the first time how these changes persist into adulthood. "Although MDMA and cocaine are psychoactive substances frequently used by teenagers, very few studies have been done to analyse the short and long-term consequences of joint exposure to these drugs", Jos Miarro, lead author of the study and coordinator of the Psychobiology of Drug Addiction group at the UV, tells SINC. The study, published in the journal Addiction Biology, shows for the first time that exposure to these drugs during adolescence leads to long-lasting changes that increase the reinforcing power of ecstasy or MDMA, and which last until adulthood. Miarro's team studied the joint consumption of different drugs in order to carry out an in-depth examination into the effects of this interaction. The scientists administered MDMA, cocaine and saline solution to mice over an eight-day period. "The animals exhibited an increase in vulnerability to re-establishing behaviour (relapse), showing a preference for certain environments previously associated with the pleasant effects of the drug", explains Miarro. The results highlight that the so-called "reinforcing effects" are greater in adult mice treated with ecstasy or cocaine during adolescence than in adolescent mice not exposed to these drugs. "Adolescence is a critical stage in development, during which time drug consumption affects plastic cerebral processes in ways that cause changes that persist right through to adulthood", adds the scientist. Adolescence the kingdom of polyconsumption The results of various surveys, both national and international, show that one of the most common patterns of drug use is polyconsumption. Ecstasy is regularly consumed alongside other drugs such as alcohol, cannabis and cocaine. These same surveys show that 44% of cocaine users in Spain also take ecstasy, and this consumption takes place primarily during adolescence. The State Study on Drug Use among Secondary School Students (ESTUDES 2007, Government Delegation for the National Plan on Drugs), showed that more than 75% of secondary school students who reported taking MDMA also said they used cocaine, while only 44.3% of cocaine users said they took ecstasy. References: Manuel Daza-Losada, Marta Rodrguez-Arias, Mara A. Aguilar & Jos Miarro. "Acquisition and reinstatement of MDMA-induced conditioned place preference in mice pre-treated with MDMA or cocaine during adolescence". Addiction Biology 14, 447-456, octubre de 2009. [ | E-mail | Share ]
Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Exploring the characteristics of viscoelastic fluids - PhysOrg Posted: 04 Feb 2010 06:40 AM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. Teran works in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He collaborated with Lisa Fauci at Tulane University and Michael Shelley at New York University to create a computer model depicting what happens when a free swimmer moves through a viscoelastic fluid. Their results can be seen in Physical Review Letters: "Viscoelastic Fluid Response Can Increase the Speed and Efficiency of a Free Swimmer." "Our experiment is a computer simulation that is more representative of the real medium than simpler models relying on a more standard Newtonian fluid. The simpler models work out nice mathematically, but they are not a very accurate description of the physics that are happening," Teran explains. With the simpler models, a wave is often depicted as moving through the fluid, with no head or tail. Additionally, these simpler models only account for the viscosity of the fluids, rather than including an element of elasticity. Teran and his peers added a free swimmer with a head and a tail, and included information representing tail undulations. They also used a viscoelastic Boger fluid in their calculations to more accurately represent the actual conditions. "What we found defies conventional wisdom," Teran says. "When you think of a viscous fluid, like mud or honey, the fact that it is hard to swim through comes to mind. It's inherently resistant to shear, and it is more likely to stop you. If you add elasticity, it seems like it should be even harder to swim through, since a viscoelastic fluid has a memory and resists changing shape. However, we found that a free swimmer ends up going faster in a viscoelastic fluid than a just plain viscous fluid." The answer lies in the tail motion of the swimmer. "If you accentuate the tail motion, as seen in a lot of microscopic swimmers, you see them able to move faster because they can use the elasticity in the fluid to sort of push off. It's leverage for use in biology." Teran believes that the work he had done with Fauci and Shelley has implications for a number of biological applications. "The most obvious is in reproduction and fertility," he points out. "Understanding how sperm locomote could be helpful in figuring out how to aid in reproduction. Teran also insists that understanding how these fluids work could have other uses in some engineering and biological functions. "There are a wide range of applications for fluids, and understanding their dynamics could be useful." Next, Teran, Fauci and Shelley hope to improve their model. "So far, we have only done this in a two dimension model," Teran says. "We also used a Boger fluid, which is a kind of crude viscoelastic fluid. It's simplistic and easier to tune to a given physical setting. But now that we know our model works, we want to ramp it up, improving the computer code. Three dimensional modeling is one natural extension, as is using a more complex fluid to even more accurately represent real world conditions." Hopefully, a better model will provide scientists and mathematicians with a better understanding of fluid dynamics. "Fundamentally, this could be a real help to science," Teran says, "and there are applications that could come out of this better understanding." Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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