I just got word that there will be a vigil outside Michele Bachmann‘s Woodbury office, tonight at 7, with students coming in by bus from SCSU. This is to protest her opposition to SCHIP and, I presume, her support for the war. You’ve still got time to join them!
Her office is at 6043 Hudson Rd, Suite 330,
Woodbury, MN 55125. Give her lots of grief.
Perhaps you are interested in knowing how to survive the end of civilization in an alternate universe. Or perhaps you’d like to know how to take advantage of the apocalypse to shape this universe into an alternate reality. Then you are part of the rarefied market for A SteamPunk’s Guide to Surviving the Apocalypse. There are actually some useful suggestions in there for any cultural upheaval.
(via Our Descent Into Madness)
I admit it, I’m often very harsh and critical of science reporting — it’s important stuff, so it’s infuriating to see it done badly. Rather than my usual angry growl, though, I’ll recommend this first-rate collection of constructive suggestions for what we can do to improve the media.
Yowza — Afarensis got put in charge of maintaining the links page at the Panda’s Thumb, and he has put together a huge collection of various resources for the evo-creo wars. It even includes pseudoscience links — you’ve got to appreciate a cataloging scheme that lumps Uncommon Descent and the Intelligent Design Network with Time Cube and the Raelians.
I noticed that PZ posted one of our take-home exam questions on Pharyngula and so I decided to make an entry with my answer (I okayed this with PZ first although he did warn me of the certainty of harsh reader criticism). The question referred us to a recent article in Nature about TRPV1 ion channels and asked us to describe TRPV1 ion channels and the testing that was done on them.
The transient receptor potential cation channel (TRPV1), also referred to as vanilloid receptor subtype 1, is a ligand-gated cation channel (2). This means that the channel contains organic molecules that can form covalent bonds with positive ions and is thus operated chemically. TRPV1 ion channels are non-specific and can be found on TRPV1 nociceptor (pain sensing) neurons in the central nervous system and peripheral nervous system. It may be related to thermal hyperalgesia (abnormally increased sense of pain) in both regions (2). The TRVP1 ion channel The opening in the TRPV1 ion channel was determined experimentally to be large enough to pass a 452 Da (1 Dalton = 1.657×10-24 g) dye molecule through (1). The TRPV1 ion channel, when opened by the proper agnostic, can allow anesthetic molecules to be introduced into nociceptic neurons, making it an important channel some regional anesthesics.
Most anesthetics are hydrophobic, cell membrane permeable, and function by blocking sodium ion channels on the inside of the cell. This blocks sensory nerves as well as motor and autonomic nerves (1). The main idea behind Binshtok, Bean, and Woolf’s experiment was to formulate an anesthetic that blocks the pain of sensory nerves but not motor and autonomic functions. They sited multiple sources stating that when QX-314, a charged derivative of lidocane, is introduced to the inside of a nerve cell it can inhibit sodium channels and produce analgesia. QX-314 was experimentally found to have no significant effect on nociceptor neurons externally. QX-314 is impermeable to nerve cell membranes but with a mass of 263Da is small enough to fit through TRPV1 ion channels. Capsaicin is a TRPV1 agonist, meaning it has an affinity for TRPV1 channel receptors and can affect them physiologically, in this case causing them to open.
Binshtok, Bean, and Woolf observed the membrane potential changes of rat dorsal root ganglia of various diameters exposed to QX-314 (an anesthetic), capsaicin (a TRPV1 agonist), and a mixture of the two. The voltage clamp method was used to determine whether or not the neuronic sodium nerve channels were inhibited and also which nerves channels were inhibited on. The voltage clamp method involves two wires placed in the axoplasm of a nerve cell. The first wire measures potential across the membrane and the second wire propagates electrical current (3). The voltage across the membrane is controlled while the ionic current is measured. Using this method, they found that QX-314 and capsaicin applied together could block the generation of action potentials (1). This effect can be attributed to neuronic sodium channel inhibition. If sodium channels are blocked then the depolarization phase of the action potential cannot take place and a wave of depolarization, a nervous signal, cannot be propagated along the neuron (3). The voltage clamp method used in this experiment involved blocking potassium and calcium ion currents so that the sodium ion current could be recorded by itself.
Binshtok, Bean, and Woolf concluded that neither QX-314 nor capsaicin produced significant effects on nociceptor neurons when applied individually but almost entirely block nociceptor sodium channel function when applied together. The brilliant idea behind all of this is that, if QX-314, an anesthetic, is introduced along with capsaicin, a TRPV1 agnostic, it will only travel through the TRPV1 ion channels of nociceptor neurons. Sodium channels in nociceptor neurons will be blocked while other neurons that lack TRPV1 will remain unaffected. The end result is an anesthetic that blocks painful sensation but does not compromise autonomic and motor nerve function.
References:
1. Alexander M. Binshtok, Bruce P. Bean, & Clifford J. Woolf. Inhibition of nociceptors by TRPV1-mediated entry of impermeant sodium channel blockers. Nature. 4 October 2007. Vol449 pp607-610.
2. M.Cui, P.Honore, C.Zhong, D.Gauvin, J.Mikusa, G.Hernandez, P.Chandran, A.Gomtsyan, B.Brown, E.K.Bayburt, K.Marsh, B.Bianchi, H.McDonald, W.Niforatos, T.R.Neelands, R.B.Moreland, M.W.Decker, C.H.Lee, J.P.Sullivan, C.R.Faltynek. TRPV1 receptors in the CNS play a key role in broad-spectrum analgesia of TRPV1 antagonists. 13 September 2006. Neuroscience Research. Global Pharmaceutical Research and Development. Abbott Laboratories.
3. Elaine N. Marieb. Human Anatomy and Physiology. Sixth Edition. Pearson, Benjamin, Cummings. 2004.
UMM recently hosted the University of Minnesota board of regents, and we got a look at the status of the whole U of M system. It’s not a happy story. We have an administration with ambitious goals (that’s good), but they seem to be a bit divorced from reality — they want to turn us into one of the top three public research universities in the world. That sounds like a great 50 year plan, but I’d rather see an ambitious and feasible 5-year goal, myself.
One of my colleagues at the Twin Cities branch campus has analyzed some of the statistics. The most telling one to me is that, despite our goals, our increase in research spending is the least of all of our competitors — we aren’t keeping up. It’s fine to be at the tail end of the pack in a race and plan to pick up your pace to win, but to talk big while slowing down does not give one much confidence.
Here’s a summary of the summary:
Is it really credible to continue on with this “ambitious aspiration” to “become one of the top three public research universities [in the world]?” Let’s admit we have some serious problems here and concentrate on fixing them. Let’s also commit to getting the University of Minnesota at least to the mid-point of the BigTen rankings outlined above. That will be a difficult enough task.
The ultimate problem is declining investment in education, both in higher ed and our source of students, the Minnesota public schools. Rather than touting grand dreams, it might be wiser of our administrators to highlight the deficiencies in the support our government is giving us, and get them to quit taking the UM system for granted.
Oh, and throwing money into stadiums doesn’t seem like the best use of our limited resources.
I just got back from Madison, which is mad about Halloween, and then I was emailed this exceedingly cool Halloween costume idea: dress up as a jellyfish with flashing LEDs.
It looks easy: here are the full instructions, with the traditional hot glue gun and soldering iron, but no duct tape, which does violate the rules of home handicrafts, I think. The only drawback is that the LEDs cost about $2.50 each, which adds up. The jellyfish uses 18, but if you modified this to make a luminescent squid, you’d only need 10.
Another virtue for the paranoid parents out there, though, is that the late night traffic won’t be able to miss seeing your kid when he or she is crossing the street.
Someone compiled a list of the most popular Minnesota blogs. Pharyngula is number two. That would be OK, except that number one is that awful exercise in Bush sycophancy, Powerline.
I’m sorry to have to put this burden on you, but you’re going to have to read this site twice as often, and you’re going to have to show your grandma how to subscribe to it, because, really, Powerline is so creakingly archaic. We need to pass them by.
At least they don’t bring up evolution any more, since the last time they got spanked.
(via #4)
Great Christina explains why there’s nothing with atheists being angry. We’ve got cause.
Tara has a real horror story: a geneticist failed to follow procedure in mailing some samples, sharing some harmless commercial strains of some innocuous and common bacteria with an artist, the kind of thing that a bureaucrat would reasonably respond to with a hand-slap and insistence that the mistake not be repeated. Except that in this case the federal government has charged in under the pretext of anti-bioterrorism laws (thanks, Patriot Act) and…
Normally, this would be an issue handled between Ferrell (and his university) and ATCC; however, under the broad definitions of mail and wire fraud under the Patriot Act, the government stepped in and charged Kurtz and Ferrell with mail and wire fraud–felonies that, since they’re being charged under the Patriot Act, could carry a possible 20-year sentence.
The whole thing is a ham-handed mess, mismanaged by utterly clueless federal law enforcement agencies who basically freaked out over a vial of ordinary soil bacteria. Be careful not to sneeze anywhere near your income tax returns, or you could be guilty of biological warfare against the IRS.
