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Caribou Drone Study

My article is from the Santa Fe Institute and I obtained it through biology news net.  The article was posted March 26th, 2018 and is titled “Caribou drone study shows enormous variation within heard.”  As a criminal justice major with a minor in biology I hope to work as a game warden after graduation dealing with poaching, fishing, and hunting laws.  As a result of my study interest I was drawn to this article dealing with the diversity between the same herd of caribou. This article follows the migration of the Dolphin-Union caribou from fall to spring.  These researchers used drones to follow these caribou across their migration and collect footage which they later analyzed and collected data from. They could see through the trajectories of each caribou how the social influence of each member affects their movements within heard patterns.  Through this they found enormous variation from individual to individual within the same heard. They also learned that these caribou are more
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Ketamine vs Depression

Kayla Ivie Ketamine vs. Depression Ketamine is a anesthesia, which introduces a trance-like state while relieving pain and causing sedation and memory loss. But in recent clinical trials, there has been use of the drug in treating depression. Hailan Hu, a neuroscientist at Zhejiang University School of Medicine in Hangzhou, China, is a senior author on the new study. Hu has suspected that the drug is affecting the brain in the lateral habenula. These studies were used with mice and rats. Hu and the other scientists she worked with discovered that the Ketamine did affect that part of the brain. In the article it states that “a small proportion of the neurons in the lateral habenula fire several times in quick bursts, rather than firing once at regular intervals; the team found that “depressed” rodents had a lot more of these quick burst cells. In brain slices from normal rats, only about 7% of cells were the bursting type, but in rats bred to display depression-like behavior, the
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Stem Cell Research and its Importance

Over the last few years there has been lots of research done regarding stem cell research, to regenerate and fix damaged organs in the body. With the help of stem cell research there has been much discovered about the body in general which helps to advance the cause of medicine helping to finding cures and treatments for different diseases and disorders. To show some of the research I am writing this blog post on, “Targeted Repair of Heart Injury by Stem Cells Fused with Platelet Nanovesicles.”             I have chosen this paper because it illustrates different discoveries scientist have had while finding a way to potentially help stem cells to regenerate cardiac tissue following a myocardial infarction or a heart attack. Through the course of this paper, Junnan Tang and the other scientists he was working with talked about one of the hardest issues regarding cardiac stem cells which is the fact that they have a hard time implanting. The heart is a powerful pump that constantly ha
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Giraffes More Speciose than Expected

Aaron Ashby Until it was recently discovered, it was the belief that there was only one species of giraffes. Which is easy to understand because they are large unique mammals that look really similar to one another. Scientists from Senckenberg and a giraffe conservation foundation have recently put time into studying the genetic makeup of giraffes, and have made the discovery that there are four different species of giraffes instead of one. For the longest time giraffes were classified as one species with nine different subspecies that underlie the main classification of giraffe. These subspecies were based on different characteristics of the giraffe, that is their coat pattern, horn structure, and where they are geographically. The most recent estimates of the giraffes population have shown that their numbers have gone down tremendously by 35% over the past 30 years. It was thought to be that this extinction was slowly occurring because people were hunting them down for their
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Cell phones and Cancer?

Some recent studies are calling us to be more cautious about our cell phone usage. There have been some studies on lab rats over the last two years that have started linking cell phone usage to higher cancer rates. Basically what the experiment was, Scientists exposed a bunch of lab rats to about the same amount of RF radiation (Radio Frequency, the kind of radiation cell phones use to communicate with cell towers) cell phones and wireless routers and basically all of our modern internet devices, expose us to. Long story short the Rats had a noticeably higher rate of schwannomas, and cancer in glial cells than regular non-exposed rats.  There were some other really cool findings from the study too. For example only Male lab rats contracted Schwannomas (cancer of Schwann cells in nerve tissue) and only female lab rats were found to have glioma. (cancer in glial cells, cells that help brain cells) They also found higher levels of other types of cancer such as skin cancer, prostate ca
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The Not So Junk DNA

Gary Frisk 3/30/2018 Blog Post The Not So Junk DNA We have always been told that we are closely related to chimpanzees. DNA exome sequencing has shown that we vary by less than 1% in our protein encoding segments of our DNA. This article discusses the work of Katherine Pollard, a biostatistician at the Gladstone Institutes and the University of California, San Francisco, and her team, have found a significant difference between the introns, or “junk DNA,” of humans and most animals, and how that “junk” is possibly why we are so different from all other life on the planet. Pollard’s earlier work sequenced the differences between human and chimpanzee genomes. The 716 differences are called “human accelerated regions” (HARs). Technology to study the affects of these HARs had to catch up to this discovery. Working with Nadav Ahituv, a geneticist at U.C.S.F., they used biotechnology to splice HAR DNA into neurons they created using human and chimpanzee check cells. Doing th
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Kill The Pain But Not The Patient

               Opioid’s are a serious problem that according to Edward Bilsky, an opioid pharmacologist and provost at Pacific Northwest University of Health Sciences, can potentially be eliminated. Opioid addiction is a problem that needs to be faced as soon as possible. Utah has many different ads that are sure to be seen driving on the freeway, but we are not the only state that has an issue. Many people have died and many more will continue to die “In 2015, 2 million Americans suffered from prescription opioid addiction, and more than 33,000 died of an opioid overdose” (pg. 44) There is a solution to the problem at hand.               In Jonathon Keats’ article, building a better Painkiller, Christopher Stein stumbled upon something that would change the way that opioids are researched. He noticed that among rats an inflamed leg would be numb to the effects of touch, but another leg would still be perceptive to touch. It took a while, but the scientists finally determined that
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