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Last September, sophomore Kate Kapshandy was sitting in the Jubilee Hall office of one of her closest mentors, business professor Mike Reuter. While they were chatting, finance professor Yeomin Yoon dropped in.
Yoon loves ballroom dancing, and every year at the Stillman School of Business’ annual dinner dance, he invites a professional dance instructor to perform with him. So when introducing the two, Reuter mentioned that Kapshandy was quite a dancer, too — taking four national amateur titles in the past two years.
Yoon immediately asked Kapshandy if she’d like to dance with him at the upcoming Stillman dance. She politely declined, explaining that she prefers to keep her academic and dancing lives completely separate.
“I’ve always felt they just don’t mix well together, dancing and school,” Kapshandy explains. “People at school think it’s cool that I dance, but at school I focus on school. And when I’m dancing, I’m just dancing.”
And she’s done a lot of dancing. The 19-year-old has performed in more than 90 national and international competitions and won more than 40 titles.
Yet when it comes to planning her dancing career, Kapshandy is surprisingly pragmatic. Other amateurs may focus entirely on competitions, but she spends just as much energy on her academic life, developing skills and contacts in the world of business.
…Read the rest of my latest article from Seton Hall Magazine
Every couple of months, it seems, a human genetic study fingers yet another variant that’s associated with autism. It’s only a matter of time before scientists put many of these candidates through the next step in translational research: studying how the variant changes a mouse’s behavior or brain circuitry.
This approach assumes, of course, that a given variant would work the same way in mice as it does in humans. But the biology of mice and men may not be as similar as everyone has thought.
The Mouse Genome Sequencing Consortium published a first draft of the mouse genome (about 96 percent of it) in 2002, in Nature. They found that 99 percent of the 30,000 mouse genes have direct counterparts in humans, and that 90 percent of genes associated with disease are identical in the two species.
But the story got slightly more complicated on Tuesday, when the Consortium revealed the complete mouse sequence in PLoS Biology. Surprisingly, it turns out that about 20 percent of the mouse’s genes emerged in the last 90 million years — that’s after mice and humans parted ways on the evolutionary tree.
Most of the 176,000 gaps left in the first draft represented duplicated segments of the genome. These repeated regions are the most likely to spawn DNA replication errors — meaning that they’re the most likely to see mutations and the most likely to change in just a few generations.
What do these findings mean for the ever-growing numbers of ‘autistic’ mice? Perhaps not much. We still share more than 15,000 genes with mice. And of the ten gene families that the study found to be mouse-specific, eight involve reproductive functions, which may not be particularly relevant to autism biology. As some commentators put it in the 2002 Nature issue, the little critters may be the better choice for ‘man’s best friend.’
Five months after 19-year-old Anwari Begum’s wedding, her body was found charred beside two empty kerosene cans near her home in South Delhi, India. Years later, a court found Begum’s husband and mother-in-law guilty of her murder. Their motive: The young bride had not paid a large enough dowry.
Fire accounts for 2 percent of all deaths in India, according to a report published recently in The Lancet by Veena Das, chair of the Krieger School’s Department of Anthropology, and colleagues from Harvard University. Women, most between the ages of 15 and 34, account for nearly two-thirds of those deaths, the study found.
In 1967, British archaeologist Nicholas Flemming discovered Pavlopetri, a 3,600-year-old town submerged four meters underneath the southern tip of Greece. The next year, divers measured the 500-square-meter site with tape measures. Now, Jon Henderson and colleagues from the University of Nottingham are using sonar technology to create a comprehensive 3D map of the site.
Last week, Nature News published an interview with Henderson. It’s a fascinating read. Here’s his explanation of how the technology works:
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Can a robot get a patent?
Two months ago, in Science, Ross King and colleagues from Aberystwyth University in the UK introduced the world to Adam, the world’s first robot-scientist. Adam can independently design and carry out simple genetic experiments on yeast — up to 1,000 of them per day.
Adam’s creators predict that his kind will revolutionize science, making it easier to deal with the glut of information coming from whole-genome sequencing, say. Adam is an incredible invention, for sure, and the science media unsurprisingly ran with it.
But in a letter to Science last week, three lawyers from Philly pointed out one little snag in the robotic-science scenario: If Adam invents something, he probably has no intellectual property rights. From the piece (boldings mine):
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Most people with autism are born with it, and though they may learn various coping strategies, they have it for life. But a little-known fact is that a fraction of kids with autism eventually lose those diagnoses. The controversy lies in the size of that group: estimates range wildly between 3 and 25 percent.
For the past few years, Deborah Fein of the University of Connecticut has been trying to pin down more specific numbers, and to figure out what factors (if any) lead to recovery.
In the 1930s, millionaire heiress Frances Glessner Lee revolutionized the field of medical forensics. Her crazy idea: coroners should be trained in medicine.
Over the course of the next 20 years, Lee hosted several conferences for forensics experts across the country. At these meetings, she presented the experts with “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Deaths” — incredibly intricate dioramas of real crime scenes.
The New York Times has a fantastic slideshow of the dioramas up now, courtesy of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore.
The slideshow captions say that Erle Stanley Gardner, author of the Perry Mason mysteries, wrote: “A person studying these models can learn more about circumstantial evidence in an hour than he could learn in months of abstract study.”
The Scientist just published a review and slideshow of the new AMNH exhibit Extreme Mammals: The biggest, the smallest, and most amazing mammals of all time.
This particular specimen, my favorite of the bunch, is a sugar glider, which looks like a flying squirrel but that’s actually a cousin of the kangaroo. Apparently it’s the kids’ favorite, too:
An enclosure housing a family of live sugar gliders — Australian tree-dwelling marsupials — is sure to captivate the exhibit’s younger visitors. Expect to encounter gaggles of children in various states of arousal over the adorable mammal’s frenzied activities as they glide around their nocturnal habitat.
There’s no denying that, in the past two decades, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has revolutionized neuroscience. Its colorful, fine-resolution pictures allow scientists to compare patterns of activity in different brain regions during specific tasks.
Every technique has its drawbacks, of course, and many of fMRI’s flaws — such as the fact that it measures blood flow, an indirect measure of neuron activity — are often mentioned in papers and discussed at conferences.
But one flaw is rarely brought up and is apparently more widespread than anyone realized: when choosing from the enormous amounts of data generated from an fMRI experiment, scientists often ‘double dip’, or use the same subset for setting up a hypothesis and for confirming it.
So says a group led by Chris Baker of the National Institutes of Health. In this month’s Nature Neuroscience, Baker reports that at least 57 of the 134 fMRI-based studies published in the top five journals last year based their conclusions on this kind of biased data.
I love stem cells. And I love President Obama for lifting the federal ban on stem cell research.
That said, there is no denying that the therapeutic promise of emybronic stem cells is usually overstated — by everybody. Here are just a couple of examples from a quick Google News search:
