Interesting article (from Nov 2011 Cell Biology): The new cell anatomy

“These days, textbook diagrams of cell structures such as the nucleus, mitochondrion, ribosome and Golgi apparatus are beginning to seem out of date. New imaging techniques, genome data, interest from disciplines outside cell biology and a bit of serendipity are drawing attention to an intricate landscape of tubes, sacs, clumps, strands and capsules that may be involved in everything from intercellular communication to metabolic efficiency. Some could even be harnessed for use in drug delivery or in synthesis of industrial products, such as biofuels.”

“Here Dr. Sacks recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders: people afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations; patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents.”

via Man Who Mistook his Wife | Oliver Sacks, M.D., Physician, Author, Neurologist.

“From the pages of Your Inner Fish, it is clear that if a supreme being were responsible for creating life on Earth, from bacteria to humans, He or She displayed little intelligence. Far from being the perfectly crafted handiwork of a deity, our bodies are jerry-rigged patchworks of old bones, cells and genes bolted on to old frameworks that creak and groan at every opportunity. Men suffer hernias because their spermatic cords, inherited from ancient fish ancestors, leave them susceptible to gut tissue spilling through muscle walls, for example, while the evolution of the voice box has left us vulnerable to all sorts of breathing and swallowing ailments.

“Or consider hiccups. Spasms in our diaphragms, hiccups are triggered by electric signals generated in the brain stem. Amphibian brain stems emit similar signals, which control the regular motion of their gills. Our brain stems, inherited from amphibian ancestors, still spurt out odd signals producing hiccups that are, according to Shubin, essentially the same phenomenon as gill breathing.”

via Review: Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin | Books | The Observer.

“What goes on in human beings when they make or listen to music?”

via Goodreads

“Like all of Roach’s books, Gulp is as much about human beings as it is about human bodies.”

via Goodreads

A number of researchers are now convinced mothers seed their fetuses with microbes during pregnancy. They argue that this early inoculation may be important to the long-term health of babies. And manipulating these fetal microbes could open up new ways to treat medical conditions ranging from pre-term labor to allergies.

Many suspect that immune cells in the mother’s intestines swallow up bacteria there and ferry them into the bloodstream, where they eventually wind up in the uterus.

via Human Microbiome May Be Seeded Before Birth – NYTimes.com.

“The problems we are trying to solve require so many calculations, we ask people to donate their unused computer power to crunch some of the numbers.”

Help Stanford University scientists studying Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, and many cancers by simply running a piece of software on your computer. Add your computer to over 274,000 others around the world to form the world’s largest distributed supercomputer.

via Folding@home.

Memory Protein Fades With Age | Science/AAAS | News.