Wonder-filled living

The City by Brunch: Montreal

#CanadianGraffiti Canada’s next tourism campaign: “Maple syrup sampling. ‘Nuff said.” Oh, it’s real and it’s here in Montreal. Young, bearded men in buttoned-down plaid shirts deal tastes of our iconic tree’s gifts. One scoop I experienced had a smooth smokiness mixed in: like the reason you eat bacon with pancakes. “We boiled it over an open fire,” I was informed. The craft was distinct in…

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We willingly enter fictional worlds where we cheer our heroes and cry for friends we never had. -Marco Tempest

World Cup 2010 South Africa vs. Mexico. Image credit: Celso FLORES from Paris.

Ah, the World Cup. The suspense of a free kick. A player takes a fall worthy of any middle school drama class. Puppies run onto the field. OK, it wasn’t at the Cup but that needs to happen more often. Soccer…

So, I'm dating a cyborg He rarely breaks down. I think the last time I remember was in high school. The company was amazing and overnighted a replacement part, so luckily he didn't have any downtime. When we go hiking or travelling, we always bring spares. But, if the circuits themselves went, he'd have to go full manual. My partner is type 1 diabetic and though he's no Ironman, he makes me laugh. He sports an insulin pump and now researches the genetic side (translational genomics) of diabetes. So when scientists announced a bionic pancreas this month, we were a bit interested. The insulin pump design hasn't changed much since the late 90s, so most people see his "pager" and think he's a doctor or a hipster. He's pretty OK with either.

When man wanted to make a machine that would walk he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg. – Guillaume Apollinaire

An iron 4-pack. Image by Angelo DeSantis [CC-BY-2.0].

He rarely breaks down. I think the last time I remember was in high school. The company was amazing and overnighted a replacement part, so luckily he didn’t have any downtime. When we go hiking or travelling, we always…

http://wp.me/p32mS8-7B

One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. – Gaston Bachelard

The bonds between neurons determine if a memory takes root.  Image credit: Jan Homann

Thinking about memory is meta, but what is memory on a strictly physical level? How exactly does Pharrell’s “Happy” get trapped in our minds? Like something out of Men in Black, researchers used…

As in an explosion, I would erupt with all the wonderful things I saw and understood in this world.

- Boris Pasternak

Captivating shapes and contrasting colours make Smith Rocks one of the “7 wonders of Oregon.”

It’s 7:00a.m. after a 10 hour road trip into the desert that involved braving a flash snowstorm without tire chains. The iridescent orange of the Morning Glory wall makes it take longer to set up camp in the early light. I wouldn’t have heard of Smith Rocks, Oregon if it weren’t for my friends’ passion for climbing…

Saturn’s moon Enceladus: a major contender for life in our solar system. Image credit NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Life has evolved to thrive in environments that are extreme only by our limited human standards: in the boiling battery acid of Yellowstone hot springs, in the cracks of permanent ice sheets, in the cooling waters of nuclear reactors, miles beneath the Earth’s crust, in pure salt…

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. -Douglas Adams

Image credit: Sergiu Bacioiu

The Big Bang was kind of a big deal. As everything in the known universe…

There is no greater index of character so sure as the voice.

-Benjamin Disraeli

Your voice tells elephants if you’re a danger 

Elephants may be better at understanding people than we are. Elephants have long been known to have incredible intelligence, and their own language (they even have their own word for “human”). Now, researchers from the University of Sussex have just discovered that to avoid danger, elephants can distinguish threatening people from non-threatening ones — just from hearing them speak.

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.

-Marcel Proust

Can brain scans reveal your bday?

The weather can impact your mood today, but it has also left a visible mark on your mind. Columbia University Medical Centre neurologist Spiro Pantazatos has made connections between people’s season of birth (which he subtly calls “SOB”) and structures in their brains — so obvious that he can predict a person’s SOB based on a scan of their brain.

SOB has long had a bad rep., being linked to future psychological and biological conditions like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, suicidal tendency, risky behaviour and novelty seeking in humans. Seasons (or light exposure) have even been found to impact the circadian clock neurons of rats: a part of the nervous system that regulates wake/sleep cycles among other bodily patterns.

All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come. - Victor Hugo

Fusion's first steps Dr. Hurricane fired 192 lasers that ignited a tiny sun and, in his words, “A lot of people are jazzed” about it. Just outside of sun-less San Fransisco, researchers have created what could be deemed the tiniest sun in the universe in an attempt to develop a sustainable fusion power source.

Dr. Omar Hurricane of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory led the experiment and humbly noted that it had released 10 times the power of previous fusion results. Harnessing the almost limitless energy of fusion power would eliminate society's reliance on other fuel sources and allow for greater energy use.

When we are no longer able to change a situation — we are challenged to change ourselves. -Viktor E. Frankl

Pulling a rabbit out of a blood cell

The dream of using STEM cells to regrow organs and advance human health had one major challenge — creating them was slow, costly, and ineffective. A new method dubbed “STEM cell ceviche” offers a fast, cheap way to convert body cells, such as blood or skin cells, into STEM cells by bathing them in a tangy citric acid mixture.

The result of another happy accident, researcher Haruko Obokata at the RIKEN Centre for Developmental Biology in Japan discovered that sometimes her cells looked a lot like “pluripotent” STEM cells — ones that can develop into other cells types — when they were stressed. She tested this idea by placing cells in acidic environments, squeezing them, and lowering their oxygen levels.

After creating mouse pluripotent STEM cells and even growing entire mice from the cells, Obokata had a big problem: proving to an understandably skeptical research community that this miraculous technique worked and that her results weren’t fabricated.

What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal. -Albert Pike

Immortality & the mind

Can the mind live without the body? Most people would say “yes,” but why? Scientists have narrowed in on the answer, and it has nothing to do with fear of death, or religion.

The need to know:

Researchers had tried to study the psychological roots of the concept of an immortal self (soul, ghosts, etc) but ran into one big issue: people are exposed to ideas of the afterlife from cultural scripts, religion, and ideologies.

To get around this issue, scientists interviewed children about their prelife existence, as few cultural scripts contain prelife ideas whereas many contain afterlife ones.

The researchers wanted to see if children believed that some eternal part of them existed before they were conceived and, if they did, understand if that prelife part was mostly mental (emotions, desires), physical (pain, sight), or both.

They discovered that children of all ages attributed mental not physical attributes to their prelife self. This is similar to the widespread ideas of “soul” where most bodily functions are eliminated but emotions and feelings live on.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. -Edward Abbey

How to Kill Cancer

“Curing cancer” can seem more likely to be in a beauty pageant speech than a newspaper headline. Metastasis (spreading of cancer cells) accounts for 90% of cancer deaths and has been the biggest barrier to finding a cure. A tumour can be treated with surgery and radiation, but if its sneaky cells escape into the blood stream they can secretly plant new cancers in vital areas.

The need to know:

Researchers have found a way to stop cancer cells from spreading through the bloodstream.

First, they created a nano-particle covered in specialized proteins that cause cancer cells to self-detonate when they attach to them.

The nano-particle first catches a ride on white blood cells and is carried through the bloodstream, knocking into and thereby killing any cancer cells in transit before they reach new areas.

The treatment also “disintegrated” cancer tumours in mouse and human samples.

We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory. - Georges Duhamel

Does even the word “spider” make you twitch? Your parents may be to blame. New research shows that some traumatic experience may be passed from parent to child — genetically.

The need to know:

Mice were taught to fear the pleasant scent of cherry blossoms, and likely some scientists’ deodorant.

Researchers repeatedly introduced the smell and then startled the mice (with a minor electric shock) until they showed anxiety every time the scent was present.

Next, the researchers studied the mouses’ offspring (let’s call them MOs) and discovered that they, too, shuddered at the cherry blossom scent — without ever being shocked.

This inherited memory was genetic, but didn’t result from changes to the parents DNA itself. Instead, it occurred when the environment (the fear) changed the structure that holds DNA together — the epigenome — which has been found to not only change gene expression, but also to be much more easy to change than DNA itself.