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(Bald Eagle and Hawk Mountain scenery. Image courtesy of David Dehner.)

 

Hawk Mountain, a picturesque site in southeastern Pennsylvania, is on the eastern slopes of the Appalachians. These mountains create an updraft that helps raptors, large birds of prey such as hawks and eagles, on their migratory flights between their northern summer habitats and their wintering sites in the southeast United States. They are also somewhat of a bottleneck, causing large numbers of raptors to converge in their flight paths and pass over Hawk Mountain.… Read the rest “Malaria: No Simple Solutions”

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Our bones, teeth and hair carry in them an encrypted GPS log of where we’ve been. If you lived in Seattle through your childhood and moved to Chicago ten years ago, that is indelibly written there. There will also be a record of what you’ve eaten recently. Advances in the science and technology of reading that information are having an impact on forensics, anthropology and agriculture, among other pursuits. At the heart of that technology lies a fundamental property of matter, which is that many of the atoms that make up all of creation come in subtle variations, variations that we are able to detect with great precision.… Read the rest “Your travels are Written in your body”

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(C57 Black/6 mouse) Attacking cancer with the immune system is one of the most enticing dreams of cancer researchers and oncologists. This dream has floated in and out of the foreground for over a century; as early as the 1890s, such a mechanism was probably responsible for a number of “miracle” cancer cures, even if the immune system was still much of a mystery. Since then, the dream of cancer immunotherapy has offered up promising results, but has never fully revealed itself.… Read the rest “Mice and Men”

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What do you think of when you hear the term “circadian rhythm”? For most of us, it’s “jet lag”, because that’s the way we’ve likely encountered it. But “circadian”, which refers to anything biological that goes through a cycle in about 24 hours, applies to many aspects of the lives of plants, animals, and even bacteria.

A flower led the way

Daily variations in the behaviors of plants and animals have been known about since antiquity.… Read the rest “Circadian Rhythm I – the plant world”

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Some people have a hard time keeping to the conventional clock. They strongly prefer to sleep and stay up late. Some people show the opposite behaviour; they wake up very early, but are ready for bed well before the late evening news. Although there may be exceptions (teenagers and jazz musicians come to mind), both kinds of behaviour are often related to a changed circadian rhythm. Late sleepers are referred to as “delayed phase” in their circadian rhythm, while those who are exceptionally early to bed – early to rise are said to have “Familial Advanced Sleep Phase Syndrome” (FASPS).… Read the rest “Circadian Rhythm II – Us”

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If, like most of us, you carry more weight than you wish you did, you may have wondered, from time to time, how much that extra poundage affects your health. This has been intensively studied over the past decades. Generally, studies compare health outcomes at different values of Body Mass Index (BMI), which is a useful way to describe body type. BMI is the ratio of weight to the square of height, in metric units.… Read the rest “You can eat fat, but don’t get fat”

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Tens of thousands of grocery store items play up the fact that they are “reduced-fat”, reflecting both the government’s advice about eating less fat, and our concerns about becoming overweight or obese. Our food-shopping habits have changed over the past fifty years, as warnings were posted by the American Heart Association, Department of Agriculture Food Guides, and other agencies that became alarmed at the risk posed by fats, particularly of the ‘saturated” type, for heart disease and other medical problems.… Read the rest “The big fat myth”

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In 2006 the World Health Organisation coined a new term: “the Glasgow Effect”. It resulted from an analysis of life expectancy data in two neighbourhoods in Glasgow, Scotland. One, a prosperous upper-middle-class village outside the central city, Lenzie, had a life expectancy for a male child at birth of 82, up there with the highest in the world. In the other, a desperately poor and drug-riddled central city community called “the Calton”, a newborn boy could expect, on average, a lifespan of only 58 years (1).… Read the rest “Life Expectancy I: How Far We’ve Come”

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(Microscopic image of C. elegans with Nomarski DIC optics: by permission, Prof. Sander van den Heuvel, Developmental Biology, Universiteit Utrecht. About 200x lifesize.)

How long can we expect to live in the future? The longest recorded human life is that of a French woman, Jeanne Calment, who died aged 122 and a half, in 1997. The eighth oldest, and currently oldest living person, is an Italian woman named Emma Morano, who will be 117 on November 29, 2016.… Read the rest “Life Expectancy II: It’s in the Genes”

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The acronym SEWTHA stands for the title of the book ‘Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air’, written by the late Sir David MacKay (above, on his bike), who was a physicist profoundly interested in the energy future of the world. In SEWTHA, he uses the physicist’s toolkit to analyze how much energy we use, how we obtain it, and, most importantly, how we can replace our current use of fossil fuels with sustainable energy sources.… Read the rest “The Great Common Sense of SEWTHA”