Researchers isolate human muscle stem cells
Claire Keane

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
RMH
occasionally subtle
ojovivo

#extradirty

izzy's playlists!
Sade Olutola
Misplaced Lens Cap
trying on a metaphor
NASA
h

JBB: An Artblog!

Andulka
hello vonnie
Show & Tell



seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Spain
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Malaysia

seen from Maldives
seen from United States
seen from Indonesia

seen from Singapore
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Germany

seen from Germany

seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Germany
seen from United States
@candidscience
Researchers isolate human muscle stem cells

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
In Small Packages
Immune cells patrol our bodies looking for threats, but sometimes medical therapies are wrongly identified as the enemy. These capsules made from jelly-like hydrogel are designed to carry drugs or transplanted cells deep into damaged organs. They’ve been attacked – mobbed by immune cells (dyed green here, with blue nuclei) and overgrown with fibrosis (red). As well as being painful for patients, fibrosis (or scar tissue) can prevent these devices from releasing their cargo effectively. To elude the immune defences, crafty researchers ignored the logic of spy films. Making the devices bigger, not smaller – increasing from half a millimetre up to two millimetres in diameter – prevented their detection. Investigating how and why the immune system reacts to differently-sized capsules could have huge implications – drug delivery that is more ‘biocompatible’ may be a simple matter of making these tiny devices just a little bit bigger.
Written by John Ankers
Image from work by Omid Veiseh and colleagues
Koch Institute at MIT, USA
Copyright held by original authors
Research published in Nature Materials, May 2015
You can also follow BPoD on Twitter and Facebook
Why You Won’t Want to Miss Sunday’s Super-moon Eclipse
by Margaret Sessa-Hawkins
On Sunday, if the skies are clear, you’ll have the chance to glimpse a rare event in the night sky: a total supermoon lunar eclipse.
During this event, three things will occur at once. The moon will be both full and at its closest point to Earth – that’s known as a supermoon. And this will occur at the same time as a total lunar eclipse – that means the moon, sun and Earth will be aligned.
Because of its proximity to Earth, the moon will appear brighter and larger — 14 percent larger and 30 percent brighter than other full moons — in the sky. And it will appear a dark, coppery red, caused by the Earth blocking the sunlight that normally reflects off the moon.
Sunday’s eclipse will start at 8:45 p.m. EST and end around 1:00 a.m EST, with the reddish phase lasting for about an hour from 10 to 11 p.m…
(read more: PBS News Hour)
images by NASA’s Scientific Visualization studio
Green 3D Printer Prints Living Designs From Organic “Ink”
Spider Embryo. Via Molecular characterization and embryonic origin of the eyes in the common house spider Parasteatoda tepidariorum.

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Life in a liver vein.
Macrophages (in blue) doing their work in the central vein of a mouse liver.
(Courtesy of Hendrik Herrmann).
The carapace (hard shell) of a jewel beetle (45x)
Synthesis: Bridging Food and Materials Science to Improve the Food Supply
The image above shows a Bacillus cereus biofilm established on stainless steel. Application of nonfouling and antimicrobial coatings onto food processing equipment–such as stainless steel heat exchangers or work tables–can help reduce cross-contamination of microorganisms responsible for food borne illness and can help reduce food wasted due to microbial spoilage. UMass Amherst food scientist Julie Goddard and her lab are developing such nonfouling and antimicrobial coatings to support improved food safety and quality. Goddard is the recipient of the Institute of Food Technologists’ (IFT) 2015 Samuel Cate Prescott Award for “outstanding ability of research in food technology” awarded to outstanding young career researchers. Learn more.Image credit: Kang Huang (Goddard Lab)
Source: U Mass Amherst
Scientists Report Success Using Zebrafish Embryos to Identify Potential New Diabetes Drugs
New form of high throughput screening could significantly shorten drug discovery for many diseases, researchers say.
In experiments with 500,000 genetically engineered zebrafish embryos, Johns Hopkins scientists report they have developed a potentially better and more accurate way to screen for useful drugs, and they have used it to identify 24 drug candidates that increase the number of insulin-producing cells in the pancreas.
Source: Johns Hopkins Medicine
Images:
1 - Zebrafish embryo, 22 hours old. Credit: Buzzfeed
2 - The pancreatic beta cells of a specially bred zebrafish glow yellow to indicate the production of insulin. The pancreatic cells not responsible for producing insulin glow red.Credit: Johns Hopkins Medicine
A newly-hatched octopus frees itself from its ruptured egg case.

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
How An Integrated Data Approach Will Impact Personalized Medicine
Extracting and analyzing tissue data, such as from this melanoma sample, and correlating it to genomic and other data can advance personalized medicine development.
First child born to woman who had ovary tissue removed and frozen during childhood.
Learn more: http://bit.ly/1B8Dfjc
From egg to buzzing pollinator, a photographer captures the secret life of bees and it’s nothing short of mesmerizing.
When National Geographic asked photographer Anand Varma to shoot photos of bees for a story, he did what any photographer wouldn’t do: He started keeping bees in his backyard to better acquaint himself with the creatures. Kind of like a photographer’s version of method acting.
The video is amazing!!
source: treehugger
First human embryos genetically modified – more will come
The prospect of genetically engineering humans has come a step closer, with the publication of the first paper to describe efforts to modify embryos. There is a long way to go before we can safely tinker with our genes, but at least one group in the US and four in China are aiming to edit human embryos: this will be the first of many studies.
The work was done using a gene editing technique called CRISPR (pronounced “crisper”).
The idea of gene editing is to make specific changes in a particular gene, just as you might correct a spelling mistake. Gene editing has been around for decades, but in organisms other than mice it used to be difficult, expensive and time-consuming.
The CRISPR method – the name refers to characteristic sets of repeating chunks of DNA known as “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” – developed in just the past few years, has changed all that, allowing biologists to achieve in weeks what used to take years.
The ease, speed and cheapness of CRISPR has made it possible for more people to experiment with gene editing. Last month, it was reported that a handful of teams are trying to modify human embryos using the method. Now one of those teams, led by Junjiu Huang at the Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, has published its results.
Rejected eggs
“Because ethical concerns preclude studies of gene editing in normal embryos,” the team writes, the researchers used human eggs that had been fertilised by two sperm rather than one.
These “polyspermic” eggs may develop for a few days but never develop normally and are discarded by fertility clinics.
Huang’s team then attempted to modify one of the genes coding for the oxygen-carrying blood protein haemoglobin. Mutations in this gene cause the disease beta-thalassemia, itself a target for previous gene-editing attempts. The team injected the various snippets of RNA and DNA needed for CRISPR into the polyspermic eggs. One of the DNA sequences was a “template” for the desired changes to the gene, intended to guide the repair process.
Of the 86 eggs injected, just four were successfully modified – an efficiency rate far lower than required to make human germline gene editing a practical prospect. The others either did not survive, or were not successfully modified.
Missing the target
There were also changes to genes other than the globin gene. Such “off-target” alterations are a big concern, because they could cause serious illnesses.
It should be possible to reduce the number of off-target changes by refining the CRISPR method. However, it will probably never be possible to completely eliminate them. So if gene editing were ever to be used for modifying inherited human genetic material, it would be essential to check embryos for any off-target effects before implanting them in the mother-to-be.
In theory, this can be done by removing a single cell from a developing embryo and sequencing its DNA – a method already sometimes used during IVF to ensure embryos don’t carry serious disease mutations, called preimplantation genetic diagnosis.
Living mosaics
However, Huang and his colleagues found what could be a serious problem: the embryos were a mixture of modified and unmodified cells – so-called genetic mosaics. That means the results of preimplantation genetic testing could be misleading.
On the face of it, these findings are not encouraging for those hoping to use gene editing to correct hereditary diseases in children. However it is too soon to draw sweeping conclusions. The low efficiency and the mosaicism could be a result of using flawed eggs. There might also be a specific problem with their approach – the paper was published just a day after being received by the journal, so it has not yet been thoroughly scrutinised by independent researchers. What’s more, CRISPR is still a new method, so it is likely to be improved greatly in the coming years.
But should this kind of research be done at all? That depends on whether you think modifying the inheritable DNA of the human germline is acceptable. Some have called for a moratorium on this kind of work, and according to Huang, the paper was rejected by the journals Science and Nature in part because of ethical concerns.
Polls in various countries, however, indicate that there is actually substantial public support – sometimes over 50 per cent – for using germline modification to prevent genetic diseases.
The efficiency of gene editing can vary greatly across both species and cell types. So to find out whether any method is safe and effective it is necessary to try it in human embryos.
Journal reference: Protein Cell, DOI: 10.1007/s13238-015-0153-5
Source
Cholesterol clogged artery
“Arteries are blood vessels that carry blood rich in oxygen throughout your body. They go to your brain as well as to the tips of your toes. Healthy arteries have smooth inner walls and blood flows through them easily. Some people, however, develop clogged arteries. Clogged arteries result from a buildup of a substance called plaque on the inner walls of the arteries. Arterial plaque can reduce blood flow or, in some instances, block it altogether. Clogged arteries greatly increase the likelihood of heart attack, stroke, and even death. Because of these dangers, it is important to be aware, no matter how old you are, of the causes of artery plaque and treatment strategies to prevent serious consequences. Plaque that accumulates on the inner walls of your arteries is made from various substances that circulate in your blood. These include calcium, fat, cholesterol, cellular waste, and fibrin, a material involved in blood clotting. In response to plaque buildup, cells in your artery walls multiply and secrete additional substances that can worsen the state of clogged arteries.” Source and more information: http://bit.ly/1xC9v79

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Remember When You Were Little?
We bet Mom remembers!
The image above is a color enhanced Scanning Electron Micrograph of a Human Embryo at the eight cell stage, three days after fertilization. Known as a Morula, this is a cluster of eight large rounded cells called Blastomeres.
AMAZING PHOTOS OF WHEN YOU WERE LITTLE
Smaller spherical structures (center right and left) will degenerate. The surface of each cell is covered in microvilli. This embryo is at the early stage of transformation into a human composed of millions of cells.
Here it is dividing to form a hollow ball of cells (the blastocyst). At this eight- cell stage the morula has not yet implanted in the uterus (womb).
Once the blastocyst is embedded in the uterine lining, the placenta, a temporary organ that supplies the growing embryo with oxygen & nutrients, will develop.
Happy Mothers Day from Science Source!
© Dr. Yorgos Nikas / Science Source
A hairy death
Apoptosis or programmed cell death is an essential part of life. For example, it’s critical to human development. Where would we be if every fetal cell survived? Some cells must die to form, say, our fingers and toes; others must perish to shape our functional brains.
Cells frequently commit suicide for the good of the whole. They may become apoptotic in response to viruses or gene mutations in order to prevent further damage. Menstruation relies upon programmed cell death.
Apoptosis may be necessary, but it’s not necessarily pretty. Above is a scanning electron micrograph of several cultured HeLa cancer cells. The cell at the center is undergoing apoptosis. During the process, the cell’s cytoskeleton breaks up, causing the outer membrane to bulge and decouple. The resulting wart-like structures are called blebs, which eventually break off and are consumed by phagocytic cells for recycling.
The hairy extensions are filopodia, extremely tiny extensions of cytoplasm used by cells for sensing, migration and cell-cell interactions.