Carl Sagan Quote Print for The Planetary Society by Thomas Romer

FUCKING NASA

I’m fucking pissing myself. You know how all of Jupiter’s moons are named after his lovers and affairs? Yeah. NASA is sending a craft to check up on Jupiter. You know what the craft is called?

JUNO.

Who’s Juno?

JUPITER’S WIFE.

NASA IS SENDING JUPITER’S WIFE TO CHECK ON JUPITER AND HIS AFFAIRS AND LOVERS.

FUCKING NASA

Yup 👌😂

Foxgloves: both poison and medicine! More info/high-res image: http://wp.me/p4aPLT-1Tk

One of my garden favorites!

Value of Pi, written in Sanskrit by Arya Bhatta.

(X)

Antibiotic hunters

Bacteria known as Streptomyces (see images above) are the source of the majority of important antibiotics used in medicine today. These drugs have revolutionised the treatment of infectious disease since their introduction into clinical practice in the 1940s.

Recently, the World Health Organisation has warned of a “post-antibiotic era”, where people could die from simple infections that have been treatable for decades. This is because some disease-causing bacteria have evolved to become resistant to most currently used antibiotics, for example MRSA.

BBSRC investment in Streptomyces research since the 1960s has had a huge impact on our understanding and development of antibiotics, and scientists at the BBSRC-funded John Innes Centre are among those now using this knowledge to help discover and develop the new antibiotics needed to counter the threat of antibiotic resistance.

If you want to find out more about this area of research make sure you get yourself along to the Great British Bioscience Festival exhibit showing at the Science in Norwich Day on the 1 of June.

Read more: http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/research/impact/streptomyces-antibiotics.aspx

Top image and middle image copyright: David Hopwood and Andrew Davis

Bottom image of copyright:Tobias Kieser

Butterflies near salted roads grow larger eyes and muscles

by Sandhya Sekar

You might be able to cut the salt in your diet, but the wildlife near salted roads doesn’t have a choice. It’s not all bad, though – salt may boost the brawn of butterflies.

When roads are salted in icy conditions, some of the run-off is taken up by plants. To find out if raised sodium levels in roadside plants might affect animals that feed on them, Emilie Snell-Rood at the University of Minnesota, St Paul, and her colleagues assessed local monarch butterflies, which feed on milkweed plants.

The team found that milkweed plants at the roadside contained 16 times as much sodium as those 100 metres away from the road. The butterflies reared on these plants had, on average, 6 times as much sodium in their bodies as those reared on prairie plants, and were less likely to survive beyond the caterpillar stage. But sodium is essential for the development of nerve and muscle tissue in animals, and those butterflies that did survive on high-sodium leaves also experienced a growth spurt: males had bigger flight muscles and females had significantly larger eyes…

(read more: New Scientist)

photograph by Bruce Coleman Inc./Alamy

BodyMaps

BodyMaps is an interactive visual search tool that allows users to explore the human body in 3-D. With easy-to-use navigation, users can search multiple layers of the human anatomy, view systems and organs down to their smallest parts, and understand in detail how the human body works.

Contacted by Maggie Danhakl @healthline.com

The vasculature and underlying musculature of the neck and surrounding regions.  Ascending the side of the neck is the common carotid artery. When you take your pulse at the side of your neck (try placing a finger just beneath the rear corner of the jaw), it is the pressure wave caused by ventricular systole of the heart that is felt in this vessel.  Illustration from Traité complet de l’anatomie de l’homme comprenant la médecine operatoire by Jean-Baptiste Marc Bourgery.

Mapping The Diseases That Will Most Likely Kill You

Depending on where you live, these are the diseases that will most likely kill you. Using data from the World Health Organization, Simran Khosla at the GlobalPost labeled each nation with the disease that caused the most death in that country.

And it seems like much of the world will succumb to heart disease. Most prevalent in Africa is HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. You can zoom in on the other regions at GlobalPost.

Sundew Catapults Prey into Trap

Drosera glanduligera is a species of sundew, a group of carnivorous plants that use sticky tentacles to ensnare their prey. This is species is unique in that it has extremely fast ‘snap tentacles’ which literally fling their prey into their sticky traps.

Sundews have evolved the ability to digest insects as an adaptation to their nutrient poor habitats. Once a prey is caught in the glue-like secretions, it either dies from exhaustion or asphyxiates from being smothered in dew. The plant then secretes enzymes which break down the insect, allowing the plant to absorb its nutrients.

All species of sundew are able to move their inner tentacles to pass prey towards the center of the leaf, where digestion is most efficient. Many species are able to fold the surface of the leaf around the prey to ensure contact with a larger digestive surface.

Drosera glanduligera is the fastest moving sundew, with ‘snap tentacles’ which fold inwards within 75 milliseconds. This action is triggered when an insect makes contact with them, and are powerful enough to catapult the insect into the center of the leaf, where it becomes glued down. 

Gif from video: Poppinga, S. Et al. via Wikimedia Commons

Inner Life of a Cell | Protein Packing (NT TImes)

Two years ago, BioVisions and Xvivo set out to upgrade their animations by capturing some of the messy complexity of protein movements. They wanted to cram a virtual cell with proteins at a more realistic density, and then have them jitter and collide

In this movie, we enter a neuron by diving through a channel on its surface. Once inside, we’re instantly surrounded by a swarm of molecules. We push through the crowd until we reach a proteasome, a barrel-shaped molecule that shreds damaged proteins so their components can be used to make new proteins.

Once more we see a vesicle being hauled by kinesin. But in this version, the kinesin doesn’t look like a molecule out for a stroll. Its movements are barely constrained randomness.

Every now and then, a tiny molecule loaded with fuel binds to one of the kinesin “feet.” It delivers a jolt of energy, causing that foot to leap off the molecular cable and flail wildly, pulling hard on the foot that’s still anchored. Eventually, the gyrating foot stumbles into contact again with the cable, locking on once more — and advancing the vesicle a tiny step forward.

This updated movie offers a better way to picture our most intricate inner workings. For one thing, it helps us to understand why we become sick. A number of diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, are caused when defective proteins clamp onto other proteins, creating toxic clumps.