dying
dr. dolittle | July 25, 2013 Dying nematode worm. Image: Cassandra Coburn
Dr. Gems, University College London, and colleagues were studying aging using nematode worms. They discovered that dying nematode worms emit a wave of blue light from dying cells. It was previously thought that damaged components of aging cells collect in lysosomes forming what they call lipofuscin, which fluoresces. His team refuted that long-held belief and showed that the dying light was produced instead by anthranilate, a substance that is inactive in the acidic environment of the gut but becomes activated when cells die (necrosis) and…
esiegel | October 11, 2012"A colour is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colours, upon temperatures, upon spaces, and so forth." -Ernst Mach
Our Sun, like all Sun-like stars, will come to the end of its life someday. All the hydrogen fuel in its core will eventually burn up, and when this happens, the core itself will begin to contract. When temperatures are finally high enough, the end product of hydrogen fusion -- Helium-4 -- will begin to fuse in the contracted core, and the Sun will expand into a Red Giant.
Image credit: Northwestern…
denialism | January 13, 2012Via Zite I found the article How Doctors Die by Ken Murray and was surprised to find it one of the best I've read on the issue of end-of-life care. The context is that of how Doctors typically forgo extreme measures in the face of terminal diagnoses, and often reject the type of care we routinely provide to our patients as "not for us". While the article lacks hard data on the prevalence of these attitudes or behaviors, I have to say this viewpoint is consistent my experience of learning my colleague's beliefs and how I now personally feel about ICU care . And I'm someone who is interested…
lborkowski | June 24, 2010If you haven't already, go read Katy Butler's powerful New York Times Magazine piece about her aging father's years of decline and the hard decisions she and her mother had to make about his care. Butler's father suffered a stroke at age 79, and she writes of its effect:
His stroke devastated two lives. The day before, my mother was an upper-middle-class housewife who practiced calligraphy in her spare time. Afterward, she was one of tens of millions of people in America, most of them women, who help care for an older family member. ... Even though a capable woman was hired to give my dad…