Fun Fact about Blood Type 0

You might notice I used a zero instead of an “o”. Well, that’s exactly what I’m here to explain.

The correct terminology is actually Blood Type Zero, because of the total absense of antigens on red blood cells.

joshbyard:

Researchers Build Robot Jellyfish From Silicon and Rat Cells

A half-inch-long juvenile jellyfish pulses and swims much like any of its compatriots in oceans all over the world. The major difference? It’s entirely man-made.

“It’s a biohybrid robot. It’s part animal, it’s part synthetic material,” said Kevin Kit Parker, a bioengineer at Harvard University who led the jellyfish-building effort.

The ultimate aim of Parker’s little jellyfish isn’t to build animals, however. It’s to build artificial hearts for transplants in the future.

Parker, who has long studied heart cells, chose to reproduce a jellyfish first, so he could learn the basics of biological pumps. “The jellyfish was a first step in that we built a functioning pump with designer specs,” he told InnovationNewsDaily. “We’re going to continue to try it to ratchet it up by building harder and harder things until we’re ready for the heart.”

(via How Man-Made Jellyfish Could Help Heart Patients | LiveScience)

Brain satnav helps surgeons travel to a tumour

SATNAV is good at finding the easiest route to where you want to go. Now a version for the brain could allow a flexible probe to take the safest route to reach deep tissue. Together, the algorithm and probe could provide access to brain tumours that were previously deemed inoperable.

When surgeons want to take a biopsy from deep inside the brain, they face a problem - how to get there without damaging the brain tissue en route. Flexible needles are one solution. Ferdinando Rodriguez y Baena at Imperial College London and colleagues created such a probe in 2009, basing the design on the needle-like ovipositor that female wasps use to deposit eggs inside trees.

Just like the wasp’s ovipositor, the probe has a number of interlocking flexible shafts, each of which can slide independently of the others. The probe naturally sticks to the soft brain tissue, providing traction, which means that when one of the shafts slides further into the tissue the probe will flex. By controlling the relative movement of each shaft it is possible to send the probe snaking along a path through the tissue.

Rodriguez y Baena’s team has now begun to think about exactly which paths are best to take. “Some areas of the brain are more important than others and we needed a way to decide what route caused the least amount of damage to vital areas,” says team member Seong Young Ko at Chonnam National University in Gwangju, South Korea. “You would want to stay well away from major blood vessels and sensory areas, for example.”

The team has now developed an algorithm to direct the probe around these obstacles. It considers three factors: the distance from the scalp to the desired brain tissue, the proximity of the route to vital areas such as blood vessels or nerve bundles, and the accumulated risk along the way.

There is controversy over how to rate the importance of different parts of the brain, so the team tested the algorithm by giving arbitrary levels of importance to different areas. It revealed the path which should theoretically bring the least risk to a patient. Ko presented the algorithm at the BioRob 2012 conference in Rome, Italy, last month.

“The ability to take a curved path through the brain, selecting the most forgiving route to avoid critical regions, represents an intriguing breakthrough,” says Katrina Firlik, a neurosurgeon in Greenwich, Connecticut, who was not involved in the research. “It could not only enhance safety but might even expand the surgical repertoire to include cases currently deemed inoperable.”

That is the hope, says Ko. So far the probe has only been tested in animal tissue, but he says the goal is to use the algorithm to guide the safe implantation of electrodes deep in the brain and to improve the safety of taking biopsies from hard-to-reach tumours.

(Source: neurosciencestuff)

dirkonmyduck replied to your post: I really love Genetics. I love explaining people…

would you be able to explain to me why only female cats can have three colours? i actually really wanna know!

Oh. Ahah, ok, let me make this simple.From the very basic:

DNA is stored in the nucleus under the form of long molecules that are called chromosomes. Each chromosome has a pair, another chromosome that contains the exact same genes, but in different forms. Each chromosome came from a genetic donor (mother and father).

When in comes to males and females, catwise and humanwise, we have XX pairs for females and XY pairs for males.

At first sight, you’re like “oh ok, that works”, but there’s a catch: females have two Xs, while males function with one only. That means the extra X is unnecessary. This is solved still in the woumb, when the embryo is few days old: each cell activates one of the X-chromosomes at random.

Apparently, the genes for fur colour are in the X chromosome, which means each patch of fur has a certain X activated. A certain X brings out one colour that the other X doesn’t, scattered all over the cat’s body.

Was this clear enough?

usagov:

Image description: This photo of red blood cells was taken with a scanning electron micrograph.

Image courtesy of the Quantitative Light Imaging Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It is part of a research project funded by a National Science Foundation grant to study quantitative phase imaging of cells and tissues.

disorderedbits:

Monsters of Grok

These t-shirts make me wriggle <3

mothernaturenetwork:

Glow-in-the-dark mushroom rediscovered after 170 years
Spotted once in 1840 and then never seen again, one of the world’s most bioluminescent mushrooms has been rediscovered deep in the Brazilian wilderness.