Woah, I’m way backlogged on blog posts! Don’t worry, I have some cool stuff in the works and I’ll share soon. In the meantime check out some of the science I’ve been starting my classes off with this month.
Aging research: blood to blood – scientists can splice animals together by creating a wound in each animal and sewing them together- their natural wound healing mechanisms join their bodies and their blood (it’s called parabiosis)! If you splice an old animal to a young one the tissue in the old animal gets “rejuvenated” by the young animal’s blood. Sounds like the premise for a horror movie.
Scientists have discovered a new antibiotic that kills pathogens without detectable resistance.
Scientists have discovered that tumor cells can actually acquire previously lost DNA (in this case mitochondrial) from “normal” cells, and that the newly acquired DNA restores missing function. Think about that. Somatic cells (or cells that were once deemed somatic but now have become tumor cells) can horizontally transfer DNA. Biology textbooks get rewritten every day.
And, of course, I can’t introduce metabolic scaling and not discuss the invariance of heartbeats.
Enjoy!
Vincent Cannataro, Ph.D. 