The Avocado

I bought an avocado a the supermarket yesterday. While eating some today I decided to search the internet for some nutritional information. That info wasn’t that interesting to me, but I did find this interesting: the avocado fruit does not ripen on the tree. When it is harvested it will ripen. If the fruit is picked once it reaches maturity, and will then ripen in a few days. This can be speed up by putting the avocado in a paper bag and speed up more if other fruit such as bananas are included, because of the influence of ethylene gas.

Feeding avocados to any non-human animal should be avoided completely. There is documented evidence that animals such as cattle, horses, goats, rabbits, birds, dogs, cats, and even fish can be severely harmed or even killed when they consume the leaves, bark, or fruit. Avocados contain a toxic fatty acid derivative known as persin. Many animal organizations recommend total avoidance of all parts of the plant.

Anyway I found the information interesting 🙂 Related: Bannanas Going Going Gone – Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. – Drinking Soda and Obesity

Patenting Life – a Bad Idea

Patenting Life by Michael Crichton (new book = Next, also The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park…):

Gene patents are now used to halt research, prevent medical testing and keep vital information from you and your doctor. Gene patents slow the pace of medical advance on deadly diseases. And they raise costs exorbitantly: a test for breast cancer that could be done for $1,000 now costs $3,000.

Why? Because the holder of the gene patent can charge whatever he wants, and does. Couldn’t somebody make a cheaper test? Sure, but the patent holder blocks any competitor’s test. He owns the gene. Nobody else can test for it. In fact, you can’t even donate your own breast cancer gene to another scientist without permission. The gene may exist in your body, but it’s now private property.

This bizarre situation has come to pass because of a mistake by an underfinanced and understaffed government agency. The United States Patent Office misinterpreted previous Supreme Court rulings and some years ago began — to the surprise of everyone, including scientists decoding the genome — to issue patents on genes.

This has to be fixed, and here is one way that might help: Continue reading →

Pakistan Engineering Education

HEC’s Unconvincing Mega Projects by Pervez Hoodbhoy:

The on-going efforts at reforming higher education are turning into a disaster. Billions are being spent on mindless mega projects. The 15-fold increase in the funding of Pakistani universities over the last six years may have delivered a marginal improvement, but it is superficial and likely to be temporary.
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a realistic and modest course of action with real chances of success would have to be designed differently. We should initially aim for, at the very most, two properly planned new engineering universities under the collective authority of the European Union. We also need external help for adding engineering departments to existing universities, and to massively upgrade existing ones. It is still not too late to ask for this.

While I have no knowledge of the this situation in Pakistan the thoughts expressed in the essay make sense to me. I support investing in science and engineering education as a aid to economic growth and societal well being. But that investment must work with the existing local situation.

Water in Earth’s Deep Mantle

3-D seismic model of vast water reservoir revealed:

n analyzing the data, Wysession first saw large patterns associated with known areas where the ocean floor is sinking down into the earth. Beneath Asia, the fallen Pacific sea floor piles up at the base of the mantle. Right above that he observed an “incredibly highly attenuating region, that is both very damping and slightly slow,” he said. “Water slows the speed of waves a little. Lots of damping and a little slowing match the predictions for water very well.”

Previous predictions calculated that a cold ocean slab sinking into the earth at 1,200 to 1,4000 kilometers beneath the surface would release water in the rock that would escape the rock and rise up to a region above it, but this was never previously observed.

“That is exactly what we show here, the exact depth and high attenuation amounts right above it,” Wysession said. “I call it the Beijing anomaly. Water inside the rock goes down with the sinking slab and it’s quite cold, but it heats up the deeper it goes, and the rock eventually becomes unstable and loses its water. The water then rises up into the overlying region, which becomes saturated with water.

“If you combine the volume of this anomaly with the fact that the rock can hold up to about 0.1 percent of water, that works out to be about an Arctic Ocean’s worth of water.”

Skin Bacteria

Close Look at Human Arm Finds Host of Microbes:

“The skin is home to a virtual zoo,” said Blaser, a microbiologist who last week published online the first molecular analysis of the bacteria living on one small patch of human skin. “We’re just beginning to explore it.” The analysis revealed that human skin is populated by a diverse assortment of bacteria, including many previously unknown species, offering the first detailed peek at this potentially crucial ecosystem.

The work is part of a broader effort by a small coterie of scientists to better understand the microbial world that populates the human body. Virtually every orifice and the digestive tract are swarming with bacteria, fungi and other microbes. By some estimates, only one out of every 10 cells in the body is human.
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Blaser’s team swabbed an area of skin about the size of silver dollar on the right and left forearms of three healthy men and three healthy women. They then used sophisticated molecular techniques to amplify and analyze fragments of bacterial DNA captured by the swabs. The analysis revealed 182 species, the researchers reported. Of those, 30 had never been seen. They identified an additional 65 species when they sampled four of the volunteers eight to 10 months later, including 14 new species.

Continue reading →

DNA Transcription Webcast

DNA Transcription webcast – via How DNA transcription works

Produced by The World Wide Web Instructional Committee (WWWIC) at North Dakota State University faculty dedicated to developing internet-based educational software. Funded by NSF and the US Department of Education.

Mini Helicopter Masters Insect Navigation Trick

Mini helicopter masters insect navigation trick:

A miniature robotic helicopter has revealed a simple yet effective visual trick that lets insects fly so adeptly without sophisticated avionics.
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As insects fly forwards the ground beneath them sweeps backwards through their field of view. This “optical flow” is thought to provide crucial cues about speed and height. For example, the higher an insect’s altitude, the slower the optical flow; the faster it flies, the faster the optical flow.

Previous experiments involving bees suggest that optical flow is crucial to landing. Maintaining a constant optical flow while descending should provide a constant height-to-groundspeed ratio, which makes a bee slowdown as it approaches the ground. Distorting this optical flow can cause them to crash land instead.

Biomedical Engineering Opinion

An insight into biomedical engineering

Nevertheless, the strict regulatory procedures that must be adhered to in biomedical engineering can be frustrating and feel like a barrier to innovation, even though engineers in this field are often working at the leading edge of technology. Colin Hunsley says: “Anything new has to be shown to be better than what is currently available. A modern hip replacement, for example, is expected to last for 15 years or more; even with thorough testing via the formal clinical trials process, it can be hard to prove conclusively that a new development is significantly better.

The take-up of new products and techniques also depends to some extent on the way the market operates. In the UK, for instance, the National Health Service (NHS) funds most healthcare, whereas the USA market is driven by private medical insurance. With the budgeting structure of the NHS, it can be difficult to justify the adoption in one department of a more expensive treatment, even if it could lead to significant long-term savings for another department. This illustrates why it is important that biomedical engineers understand the market in which they operate.

Mystery Ailment Strikes Honeybees

A mysterious illness is killing tens of thousands of honeybee colonies across the country, threatening honey production, the livelihood of beekeepers and possibly crops that need bees for pollination. Researchers are scrambling to find the cause of the ailment, called Colony Collapse Disorder.
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The country’s bee population had already been shocked in recent years by a tiny, parasitic bug called the varroa mite, which has destroyed more than half of some beekeepers’ hives and devastated most wild honeybee populations.

Along with being producers of honey, commercial bee colonies are important to agriculture as pollinators, along with some birds, bats and other insects. A recent report by the National Research Council noted that in order to bear fruit, three-quarters of all flowering plants _ including most food crops and some that provide fiber, drugs and fuel _ rely on pollinators for fertilization.

Schoofs Prize for Creativity 2007

Single-handed fishing kit reels in first place in invention competition:

Brian “Sunya” Nimityongskul got the idea for a system for one-armed fishing while recovering from shoulder surgery last summer. “I wanted to be fishing and not sitting at home,” he says. “Being an engineer, I decided I’d do something about it.” He worked on it during his free time, doing the design and machining himself