clock | May 1, 2008You probably realize by now that my expertise is in clocks and calendars of birds, but blogging audience forces me to occasionally look into human clocks from a medical perspective. Reprinted below the fold are three old Circadiana posts about the connection between circadian clocks and the bipolar disorder, the third one being the longest and most involved. Here are the links to the original posts if you want to check the comments (especially the first comment on the third post):
January 18, 2005: Clocks and Bipolar Disorder
August 16, 2005: Bipolar? Avoid night shift
February 19, 2006:…
clock | April 30, 2008I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of national emergency, even if I'm in a cabinet meeting.
- Ronald Wilson Reagan
clock | April 30, 2008For dinner, we went up high, really high - 230 meters, to a rotating restaurant, perhaps the highest blogger meetup to date?! There I met Cornelius Puschmann, Martin Fenner and his lovely wife, Catriona McCallum, Randolf Nesse, Bjoern Brembs and his girlfriend, and Mark who had to run early to watch, religiously, his team Chelsey in the semi-finals of the British soccer cup. We had beer and good food (some on dangerously looking skewers), quickly forgot about the vertigo, and discussed the future of scientific publishing:
clock | April 30, 2008After lunch, Catriona McCallum and Randolf Nesse (who, yes, writes a blog) met and discussed evolution and medicine and blogging and Facebook and Open Access and PLoS, etc.:
clock | April 30, 2008After a lovely flight, Catriona met me at the airport. We went to the Institute where I checked in my room, set up my wifi, then went down to meet the people and have lunch: various cold cuts, true Coca Cola, and a cream puff:
clock | April 30, 2008There are 49 new articles in PLoS ONE this week. Here are some titles I found interesting:
Echolocating Bats Cry Out Loud to Detect Their Prey:
Echolocating bats have successfully exploited a broad range of habitats and prey. Much research has demonstrated how time-frequency structure of echolocation calls of different species is adapted to acoustic constraints of habitats and foraging behaviors. However, the intensity of bat calls has been largely neglected although intensity is a key factor determining echolocation range and interactions with other bats and prey. Differences in detection…
clock | April 30, 2008Single-celled Bacterium Works 24/7:
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have gained the first detailed insight into the way circadian rhythms govern global gene expression in Cyanothece, a type of cyanobacterium (blue-green algae) known to cycle between photosynthesis during the day and nitrogen fixation at night.
How Birds Navigate: Research Team Is First To Model Photochemical Compass:
It has long been known that birds and many other animals including turtles, salamanders and lobsters, use the Earth's magnetic field to navigate, but the nature of their global positioning…
clock | April 30, 2008As we mentioned just the other day, studying animal behavior is tough as "animals do whatever they darned please". Thus, making sure that everything is controlled for in an experimental setup is of paramount importance. Furthermore, for the studies to be replicable in other labs, it is always a good idea for experimental setups to be standardized. Even that is often not enough. I do not have access to Science but you may all recall a paper from several years ago in which two labs tried to simultaneously perform exactly the same experiment in mice, using all the standard equipment, exactly…
clock | April 30, 2008Microarrays have been used in the study of circadian expression of mammalian genes since 2002 and the consensus was built from those studies that approximately 15% of all the genes expressed in a cell are expressed in a circadian manner. I always felt it was more, much more.
I am no molecular biologist, but I have run a few gels in my life. The biggest problem was to find a control gene - one that does not cycle - to make the comparisons to. Actin, which is often used in such studies as control, cycled in our samples. In the end, we settled on one of the subunits of the ribosome as we…
clock | April 30, 2008Just landed in Berlin. Flew with JAT for the first time in decades. The best flight ever. I guess their pilots, after getting some real dogfight combat flying experience find piloting a B-737-300 way too easy...
clock | April 29, 2008The last time somebody said, 'I find I can write much better with a word processor', I replied, 'They used to say the same thing about drugs.'
- Roy Blount, Jr.
clock | April 29, 2008
Two interesting papers came out last week [from the Archives - click on the clock logo to see the original post], both using transgenic mice to ask important questions about circadian organization in mammals. Interestingly, in both cases the gene inserted into the mouse was a human gene, though the method was different and the question was different:
Turning a Mouse Into A Lark
The first paper (Y. Xu, K.L. Toh, C.R. Jones, J.-Y. Shin, Y.-H. Fu, and L.J. PtáÄek
Modeling of a Human Circadian Mutation Yields Insights into Clock Regulation by PER2. Cell, Vol 128, 59-70, 12 January 2007) is…
clock | April 29, 2008This morning I had to get up early to go and give my interview for Radio Belgrade 1, at the same time when my Radio Belgrade 2 interview was on. This one will be broadcast in ten days or so. All the radio interviews will be recorded and placed on the web so I can link to it later. Afterwards, my Mom and I went to visit the graves of my Father and grandparents, did some shopping, and ended up in "Polet", an ancient and excellent seafood restaurant in the middle of Belgrade, where we had, traditionally, fried smelt (or pilchard):
clock | April 29, 2008After watching the show jumping classes and chatting with my horsey friends, I went back to the city center, explored the place and saw that unlike most other types of stores, the bookstores are still there where I remembered them, not replaced by new boutiques and cafes, surviving the decades of hyperinflation, sanctions, wars and bombing. The Republic Square ("at the Horse"), the site of so many demonstrations in the 90s, is now a nice place for people-watching. I met a couple of friends from school there and we had cakes and reminisced about the good old times. They updated me about all…
clock | April 29, 2008Yesterday I went to the Belgrade Racecourse and the barns and was happy to meet many of my old friends, including my old trainer (with Professor Steve Steve below) as well as some good new kids, including two sisters who used to own and ride my old horse. There were two small show jumping classes yesterday (3'6" and 4'), both with simple, nicely flowing courses appropriate for the very beginning of the show season. The horses are all better than what we used to ride, the rides went smoothly, and both sisters placed in the bigger class that included a jump-off:
clock | April 29, 2008Birds Can Detect Predators Using Smell:
Many animal species detect and avoid predators by smell, but this ability has largely been ignored in the study of birds, since it was traditionally thought that they did not make use of this sense. However, it has now been discovered that birds are not only capable of discerning their enemies through chemical signals, but that they also alter their behaviour depending on the perceived level of risk of predation.
Help For Insomnia Patients? Different Processes Govern Sight, Light Detection:
A Johns Hopkins University biologist, in research with…
clock | April 29, 2008Encephalon #44 is up on Cognitive Daily
Carnival of the Green #125 is up on The Conservation Report
clock | April 29, 2008Why We Sleep: The Temporal Organization of Recovery:
"If sleep does not serve an absolutely vital function, then it is the biggest mistake the evolutionary process has ever made," Allan Rechtschaffen said. Studies of sleep and sleep deprivation suggest that the functions of sleep include recovery at the cellular, network, and endocrine system levels, energy conservation and ecological adaptations, and a role in learning and synaptic plasticity.
One Rhodopsin per Photoreceptor: Iro-C Genes Break the Rule:
A long-standing general principle in vision research holds that single photoreceptors…