Category: Curiosities of Nature

The Walking Dead’s Bloody Mess [repost]

Originally posted on 27 March 2012, we are reposting this piece to make sure you are adequately prepared for The Walking Dead to return from hiatus on AMC Sunday, 10 February 2013 at 9PM (ET). We’ll have a third post in this series for you on Saturday. 

There are spoilers below. You’ve been warned. If you are even further behind watching The Walking Dead – Season 2 than me and can’t bear the thought of being spared the waste of those hours of your life, this is not for you.

I have recently started catching up on The Walking Dead – Season 2. At the end of Episode 1, Carl Grimes, son of our hero, Rick Grimes, is wounded in a hunting accident. Episode 2 is then devoted to keeping Carl from bleeding out. This means surgery and blood transfusions. Unfortunately, you can’t just stick blood from one person into someone else1. The immune system will attack a blood transfusion as a foreign invader if the donated blood is not compatible with the recipient. These reactions can be fatal. Keeping blood banks stocked is difficult in our modern world. Trying to find appropriate blood donors for a kid with internal bleeding in a zombie-filled, post-apocalyptic wasteland poses a particular challenge. Continue reading “The Walking Dead’s Bloody Mess [repost]”

It’s not just the flu that’s going around…

H1N1 Influenza Virus. Image courtesy of the CDC.
H1N1 Influenza Virus.
Image courtesy of the CDC.

UPDATE: A major paper supporting the autoimmunity narcolepsy connection has been retracted, please see my update to this post here.

It’s been a pretty rough flu season. While my household has so far been lucky, (knocking on wood all over the house) many were knocked out of commission by this year’s influenza epidemic. Now, it turns out there’s more to be worried about than just catching the flu. A long range result of having the flu or having a flu vaccine can be development of narcolepsy…..What?!

Narcolepsy is a neurological condition in which your brain cannot regulate sleep and wake cycles appropriately. Narcoleptics can fall asleep at any time regardless of their current activity. Large-scale genetic studies have shown that narcolepsy has a strong association with mutations in the T cell receptor alpha locus. This surprising link to the immune system led to research that implicates auto-immune malfunction wherein a person’s immune system kills neurons expressing the protein hypocretin which is necessary to regulate wakefulness.

So now how is this related to the flu? Continue reading “It’s not just the flu that’s going around…”

Lucretius did not believe in non-overlapping magisteria

What does science have to do with how we should live? Not much, is often the official answer in our pluralist and technocratic society. We depend on science to be one of two non-overlapping magisteria, for the purpose of social harmony in a religiously diverse society that takes science as a dominating authority, at least in principle – even creationism or climate change denial needs to be couched in technological jargon for it to even pretend to be acceptable in discussion.

This attitude is the opposite of what we find in the Epicurean Lucretius, who wrote the world’s greatest science poem in the express belief that you can’t live life properly if you don’t understand the true nature of the universe. This idea is the key to making sense of what first struck me as an odd juxtaposition in two big features of Epicurean thought: the belief that life’s major goal is to maximize happiness, and the belief that the world emerges from the behavior of atoms. How are these two beliefs connected? The answer is death. Continue reading “Lucretius did not believe in non-overlapping magisteria”

Getting from A to B

Rebrafish retinal cells, optic nerves, and glia are labeled. Retinal cells send projections through the optic nerve to their targets in the brain.Dr Kara Cerveny & Dr Steve Wilson Wellcome Images
Visual System of 4 day old zebrafish
Dr Kara Cerveny & Dr Steve Wilson Wellcome Images

How do individual cells find their way in the complex environment of a human body or a small worm? Some cells need to navigate from where they are born to where they are needed (like immune cells). Other cells need to send out a very long extension to make a contact with a very specific target (like a neuron sending an axon through layers and layers of other neurons to reach its connection in a circuit). I used to study a very specific example (one motor neuron connecting to one specific muscle) of this type of navigation in the fruit fly. Continue reading “Getting from A to B”

Meet the Narwhal

This super-bad unicorn of the sea is most closely related to the beluga whale. The unicorn-horn is not a horn at all but a tooth that grows through the top lip. Male narwhals have one overgrown tooth (1 in 500 have 2) that usually comes from the left and in mega rare cases the female can have a tusk as well. The body length can be up to 3 meters and the tusk can be half that size. So, why do they have a tusk? Well, not for hunting because they eat benthic foods. Fighting? Breaking through the ice? These behaviors have rarely been observed. Continue reading “Meet the Narwhal”