Leahgates

Meet the friendliest, floofiest pair of Mop Tops you’ll ever find. This is Sophie and Sarah (no, no clue which is which) from the Netherlands. That’s them above (on the left?) with pals Jason and Ashley, at McDonald’s for Sophie’s birthday. Burger and fries, once a year!

Bored Panda says “6-year-old Sophie and 4-year-old Sarah are sisters from different litters, but they’re still inseparable.”

Is shyness holding back your love life? Conventional dating services that require social interaction can be stressful, but now there’s It’s Just Unbearably Awkward Lunch!™ the service that pairs you with someone as shy as you are!

Birds of a Feather, via Brett Klorer.

“With all the Quokka Love on this site lately, I thought I would submit a competitor for smiling rodent-like creature: the Tree Hyrax! They’re not actually rodents, and are somehow related to manatees and elephants,” says Megan C. of Seattle.

[Pause to work that one out.]

“Photos taken by me in Serengeti National Park, Tanzania. I regret not attempting a Selfie with a Hyrax, but they were not as camera-friendly as those Quokkas seem to be.”

Are Sad Basset Hound Looks the BEST? They pook up their eyebrowns with that looooong, forlorn Eeyore look? You bet! So who do we have here? “Dear Cute Overload: My friend Lee adopted this 9-week old Basset hound and named her Lady Sadie. (Or maybe…Ladie Sadie?) She came equipped with a Martha Stewart™ collar in a hounds tooth (ha!) pattern, which was apparently tasty (above.) I hope you think she’s as redonkulously Cute as we think she is. Love you every day!” -Sarah R.

[*Note* -Our all-day St. Patrick’s Extravaganza is NEXT. -Ed.]

Maureen P. spotted this on the U.S. Department Of The Interior FB. Photo by William Link.

With guys like THIS little maniac around- how could a guy EVER get any work done? (***WAIT. Unless….PLAYING WITH THEM IS THE WORK.) In that case, sign me up Pam A.!

Oh, but we’re not DONE with Edgar’s, nooooooo. HOW ‘BOUT SOME PIGSTERS?

“Poncho & Chico chilling after breakfast. Photo taken by me yesterday morning.” -Julie H.

Attending a highly selective college may not level the playing field for African-Americans when it comes to job offers after graduation.

Education in the United States is touted as the great equalizer—a way to overcome social disadvantages and obtain a good job. But a new study finds that although a credential from an elite university results in more employer responses for all applicants, black candidates from these prestigious universities do only as well in getting the job as white candidates from less-selective universities.

A white candidate with a degree from an elite university can expect an employer response for every six résumés submitted. An equally qualified black candidate must submit eight résumés to receive a response. White candidates with a degree from a less-selective university need to submit nine résumés to expect a response, while a similar black candidate needs to submit 15 résumés.

“These racial differences suggest that a bachelor’s degree, even one from an elite institution, cannot fully counteract the importance of race in the labor market,” says S. Michael Gaddis, a postdoctoral scholar in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health Policy Scholars program at University of Michigan. “Thus, both discrimination and differences in human capital contribute to racial economic inequality.”

1,000 fake job applicants

For the study, published by Social Science Research Network, Gaddis created more than 1,000 fake job applicants through email addresses, phone numbers, and résumés, and applied to jobs online. Each candidate listed a degree from either an elite school (Harvard, Stanford, Duke) or a nationally ranked, but less-selective state university (University of Massachusetts-Amherst, University of California-Riverside, University of North Carolina-Greensboro).

Candidates had first names that likely identified their race: Jalen, Lamar, and DaQuan (black/male); Nia, Ebony, and Shanice (black/female); Caleb, Charlie, and Ronny (white/male); and Aubrey, Erica, and Lesly (white/female).

White job applicants with a degree from an elite university had the highest response rate (nearly 18 percent), followed by black candidates with a degree from an elite university (13 percent) and white candidates with a degree from a less-selective university (more than 11 percent). Black job applicants with a degree from a less-selective university had the lowest response rate (less than 7 percent).

“Education apparently has its limits because even a Harvard degree cannot make DaQuan as enticing as Charlie to employers,” Gaddis says.

Further, race may result in a double penalty. When employers responded to black candidates, it was for jobs with lower starting salaries and lower prestige than those of white peers. Black applicants received responses for jobs with a listed salary about $3,000 less than white candidates.

Overall, candidates with a degree from an elite university received responses for jobs with a listed salary $2,600 higher than applicants with a degree from a less-selective university, the study shows.

Source: University of Michigan

The post ‘Elite’ colleges don’t equalize job market for blacks appeared first on Futurity.

New research links supersized alcoholic beverages, such as Four Loko or Joose, to a higher rate of alcohol-related injuries among some underage drinkers.

Specifically, underage drinkers of flavored alcoholic beverages who exclusively consume the supersized versions are more than six times as likely to report suffering alcohol-related injuries as underage youths who drink other types of alcoholic beverages, according to new research.

Published in the American Journal of Public Health, the study is believed to be the first study to document an association among the consumption of different types of flavored alcoholic beverages by youth ages 13 to 20, risky drinking behaviors, and self-reported injuries related to alcohol consumption.

In previous studies by the same research team, nearly half of underage drinkers in the US reported having consumed flavored alcoholic beverages in the past 30 days.

Flavored alcoholic beverages, also known as alcopops, can be classified into three categories: malt-based flavored beverages (e.g., Mike’s Hard Lemonade or Smirnoff Ice); spirits-based premixed, ready-to-drink cocktails (e.g., Jack Daniel’s Country Cocktails); and supersized alcopops (e.g., Four Loko or Joose).

Supersized alcohol beverages can contain the equivalent of between four and five alcoholic drinks.

Survey results

For their study, the researchers surveyed 1,031 underage young people, ages 13 to 20, who had consumed at least one drink of alcohol during the past 30 days between December 2011 and May 2012.

In an online, self-administered survey, respondents identified what brands of alcohol they had consumed in the past 30 days, the number of days on which they consumed each brand, and the typical number of drinks of each brand that they consumed.

Heavy episodic drinking was reported by nearly 70 percent of pre-mixed/ready-to-drink cocktail users, by about 75 percent of supersized alcopop users, and by almost 80 percent of those who consumed more than one type of flavored alcoholic beverage—compared with 45 percent of non-flavored alcohol users.

Consumption of any combination of two or more flavored alcoholic beverage was also strongly associated with reports of heavy episodic drinking, fighting, and alcohol-related injuries.

It’s not just drink size

“These findings raise important concerns about the popularity and use of flavored alcoholic beverages among young people, particularly for the supersized varieties,” says study author Alison Albers, an assistant professor of community health sciences at Boston University School of Public Health.

“Public health practitioners and policymakers would be wise to consider what further steps could be taken to keep these beverages out of the hands of youth.”

Drink size does not appear to be the only factor at work. The researchers found that among underage drinkers, those who reported three types of exclusive flavored-alcoholic beverage use—pre-mixed/ready-to-drink cocktails only, supersized alcopops only, and any combination of two or more flavored alcoholic beverages—were more likely to consume a higher number of drinks per day, to drink more days in a month, and to engage in heavy episodic drinking.

Alcohol is the most commonly used drug among youth in the US and is responsible for the deaths of approximately 4,300 underage people each year.

The team also includes researchers from the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Fiorente Media, Inc.

Funding came from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Source: Boston University

The post Big drinks like Four Loko cause trouble for teens appeared first on Futurity.

Researchers have found a protein in the brain called Neuropeptide Y (NPY) that appears to take away the urge to binge drink.

“Using a series of genetic and pharmacological approaches we identified how a compound in the brain, Neuropeptide Y (NPY), can suppress this dangerous behavior,” says Thomas L. Kash, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, who led the study published online in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

“Specifically, we found that NPY acted in a part of the brain known as the extended amygdala (or bed nucleus of the stria terminalis), which we know is linked to both stress and reward.

“This anti-drinking effect was due to increasing inhibition (the brakes) on a specific population of cells that produce a ‘pro-drinking’ molecule called corticotropin releasing factor (CRF).”

Kash says when they mimicked the effects of NPY using engineered proteins, “we were also able to suppress binge alcohol drinking in mice.

“Finally, we found that this anti-drinking NPY system is altered by long-term alcohol drinking in multiple species, suggesting that this may be either a marker or treatment for alcohol abuse,” Kash adds.

Study coauthor Todd Thiele says the findings point to potential ways to treat and perhaps “protect some individuals from becoming alcohol dependent.”

Coauthors of the study include researchers from UNC, Harvard Medical School, Oregon Health and Science University, and University of Michigan Medical School.

Grants from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies supported the work.

Source: UNC-Chapel Hill

The post This brain chemical dulls the urge to binge drink appeared first on Futurity.

Encouraging parents to have their sons get the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine—rather than just trying to get more girls vaccinated—could ultimately protect more people for the same price, according to a study by a mathematician.

Whether vaccinating boys against HPV in addition to girls would only divert scarce resources from a campaign originally designed to help prevent cervical cancer has been a matter of debate.

But with HPV-related cancers in men on the rise, and HPV vaccine coverage for girls in the United States stagnating well below the critical levels needed to ensure that most people are protected, researchers have been re-examining the case for a girls-only approach.

Male HPV cancers on the rise

Although the virus is most frequently associated with cervical cancer, women aren’t the only ones at risk. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that a third of the 27,000 cases of cancer HPV causes in the US each year occur in men, where it can cause cancers of the throat, tongue, tonsils, penis, and anus.

More than half of all people in the US will get HPV at some point in their lives. Most infections go away on their own within one or two years. But some persist, and if left untreated can become cancer.

Studies suggest that HPV-related throat and mouth cancers are on the rise in the US, and could outnumber HPV-related cervical cancers by 2020.

Many of these cancers could be prevented with vaccination. But despite Centers for Disease Control recommendations that both boys and girls ages 11 to 12 should receive the HPV vaccine, only 37 percent of girls and 14 percent of boys in the US have received all three shots in the HPV vaccine series—much lower than the proportion needed to keep the disease in check.

Do the math

To find out whether different strategies for allocating public funds might protect more people, researchers developed a mathematical model of HPV transmission among sexually active 14-18 year olds.

They then compared the effectiveness of HPV vaccination campaigns based on different cost scenarios. One set of scenarios reflected the costs of vaccinating more people based on the per-dose price of the vaccine. Another set of scenarios also accounted for the patient education costs that could be required to reach people who are less willing to have their children vaccinated.

Over the past three years, HPV vaccination coverage in girls has stagnated. Studies suggest that 44 percent of US parents are reluctant to vaccinate their kids against a sexually transmitted infection before their child becomes sexually active—even though the vaccine works best if it is given before there is any chance of exposure, when there is still time to build up immunity.

Boosting coverage in girls to sufficient levels to protect everyone could become increasingly expensive, says Marc Ryser, a mathematician at Duke University,  especially as the pool of willing parents shrinks and only the more skeptical parents remain.

Parents of boys

“Imagine that 100 parents are offered HPV vaccines for their children,” says coauthor Evan Myers, professor of obstetrics and gynecology. “Some fraction will be willing to have their child vaccinated without any questions, some won’t have their child vaccinated under any circumstances, and the rest will be in between.”

“Along the spectrum of ‘Whatever you say, doctor’ to ‘I don’t believe in any vaccinations,’ families who are currently unvaccinated are closer to the resistant end of the spectrum, and so it takes more work and costs more money to try to persuade them,” Myers says.

Real-world data on actual patient education costs are needed before the results can be translated into policy, the authors say.

But their analysis suggests that public health officials may actually be able to protect more people for the same price by shifting some funds to encourage vaccination of boys, since the fraction of parents willing to vaccinate has yet to be exhausted among boys.

“The gender with the lowest coverage is the low-hanging fruit,” Ryser says. “Stagnating vaccination rates, coupled with parental opposition, suggest that it could cost less to raise coverage in boys from, say, 14 to 15 percent than to raise coverage in girls from 37 to 38 percent.”

“Making that trade-off would be beneficial to the entire population,” says coauthor and mathematician Kevin McGoff, since boosting coverage in either sex means fewer people can transmit the disease to uninfected people.

David Herzog of Drake University and David Sivakoff of Ohio State University were also authors of the study. The National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation funded the study.

Source: Duke University

The post Time to rethink ‘girls-only’ approach to HPV vaccine? appeared first on Futurity.

They’re ready to take over the WORLD from their new base of operations at the Taronga Zoo. I mean- look at the side-eye above. You KNOW he/she’s plotting SOMETHING devious. Only a matter of time.

(BuzzFeed)

The same thing that lets high performance athletes “feel the burn” makes people with chronic fatigue syndrome feel exhausted by the most common daily activities.

New research suggests that the neural pathways that transmit feelings of fatigue to the brain might be doing their job a little too well in some people. The findings also provide evidence that peripheral tissues such as muscles contribute to feelings of fatigue.

Researchers say figuring out the origins of fatigue could help develop therapies for people with the disease.

Muscle metabolism

Chronic fatigue syndrome, which the Institute of Medicine recently renamed systemic exertion intolerance disease, or SEID, is characterized by extreme chronic fatigue. Because its chief symptom—fatigue—is often associated with many other diseases, it can be difficult to diagnose for the more than one million people who actually have it, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.

The disease has no root medical cause, and researchers don’t know what triggers it. But they are studying aspects of the disease to figure out ways to treat it.

The new study focuses on the role of muscle metabolites, including lactic acid and adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, in the disease. It demonstrated for the first time that these substances, released when a person exercises muscles, seem to activate these neural pathways. Also, the pathways seem to be much more sensitive in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome than in patients without the disease, something that hasn’t been studied before.

“What we have shown now, that has never been shown before in humans, is that muscle metabolites can induce fatigue in healthy people as well as patients who already have fatigue,” says Roland Staud, professor of rheumatology and clinical immunology at University of Florida College of Medicine and lead author of a paper in the journal Pain.

Highly-sensitive pathways

During exercise, muscles produce metabolites, which are sensed by metaboreceptors that transmit information via fatigue pathways to the brain, according to the researchers. But in patients with SEID, these fatigue pathways have become highly sensitive to metabolites and can trigger excessive feelings of fatigue.

“For most of us, at the end of strenuous exertion we feel exhausted and need to stop—but we will recover rapidly,” Staud says. “However, these individuals tire much more rapidly and sometimes just after moving across a room, they are fully exhausted. This takes a toll on their lives.”

For the study, Staud and coauthor Michael E. Robinson, professor in the department of clinical and health psychology, recruited a group of 39 patients with SEID and 29 participants without the disease. Participants wore a blood pressure cuff just above their elbows on their dominant side and squeezed a spring-loaded device with 100 percent of their maximum capacity, which was measured by a dial.

They then squeezed the device so that the dial showed they were gripping at 50 percent of their maximum capacity for as long as they could.

At the end of the hand-grip exercise, the blood pressure cuff on the participant’s arm was inflated, almost instantly trapping the metabolites generated by the exercise within the forearm muscles. This allowed the metabolites to collect in the forearm tissue without being cleared by the circulatory system. There, the metabolites continued to activate fatigue pathways, sending messages of fatigue to the brain and allowing researchers to measure how much fatigue and pain may occur because of the trapped metabolites.

With the blood pressure cuff still inflated, the participants rated fatigue and then pain in their forearms every 30 seconds. Both patients with SEID and patients without the disease reported increasing fatigue, but patients with the disease recorded much higher levels of fatigue and pain.

More fatigue, more pain

“We found that the fatigued individuals reported more fatigue than the non-fatigued individuals during the exercise, and also found that they had more pain compared to the non-fatigued individuals,” Staud says.

On the Fatigue Visual Analog Scale used to measure participants’ fatigue, patients with SEID rated their fatigue at approximately 5.5 on a scale of 0 to 10 after the hand-grip exercise while wearing the inflated blood pressure cuff, whereas participants without the disease rated their fatigue at approximately 1.5.

After 30 minutes, the participants repeated the exercise, but with the opposite arm and without the cinching blood pressure cuff so the metabolites could be cleared from the arm. Both sets of participants experienced fatigue, but the feeling of fatigue in those with the disease was much lower than when the metabolites were trapped with the blood pressure cuff.

“This suggests that hypersensitive fatigue pathways play an important role for the often pronounced exercise-related fatigue of patients with the disease,” Staud says.

Staud next plans to explore treatment interventions and to conduct brain-imaging studies of patients with SEID.

“The take-home message here is, like many of the pain studies we have conducted, there are both peripheral and central nervous system factors at play in these complex syndromes,” Robinson says, “Our study seems to highlight the important role of these peripheral tissues.”

Source: University of Florida

The post Why a walk across the room can be exhausting appeared first on Futurity.

Many soldiers who are injured on the battlefield die from uncontrolled bleeding before ever reaching a surgical hospital.

In some cases, there’s not much medics can do—a tourniquet won’t stop bleeding from a chest wound, and clotting treatments that require refrigerated or frozen blood products aren’t always available in the field.

Administered by a simple shot, a new polymer finds any unseen or internal injuries and starts working immediately to strengthen blood clots. The material could become a first line of defense in battlefield injuries, rural car accidents, and search and rescue missions deep in the mountains.

Keep people alive

In an initial study with rats, 100 percent of animals injected with the material, called PolySTAT, survived a typically-lethal injury to the femoral artery. Only 20 percent of rats treated with a natural protein that helps blood clot survived.

“Most of the patients who die from bleeding die quickly,” says Nathan White, assistant professor of emergency medicine at University of Washington and coauthor of the study in Science Translational Medicine.

“This is something you could potentially put in a syringe inside a backpack and give right away to reduce blood loss and keep people alive long enough to make it to medical care.”

To develop the macromaterial, researchers were inspired by factor XIII, a natural protein found in the body that helps strengthen blood clots. Normally after an injury, platelets in the blood begin to congregate at the wound and form an initial barrier. Then a network of specialized fibers—called fibrin—start weaving themselves throughout the clot to reinforce it.

Stronger cross-links

If that scaffolding can’t withstand the pressure of blood pushing against it, the clot breaks apart and the patient keeps bleeding.

Both PolySTAT and factor XIII strengthen clots by binding fibrin strands together and adding “cross-links” that reinforce the latticework of that natural bandage.

“It’s like the difference between twisting two ropes together and weaving a net,” says coauthor Suzie Pun, professor of bioengineering. “The cross-linked net is much stronger.”

But the synthetic PolySTAT offers greater protection against natural enzymes that dissolve blood clots. Those help during the healing process, but they work against doctors trying to keep patients from bleeding to death.

The enzymes, which cut fibrin strands, don’t target the synthetic PolySTAT bonds that are now integrated into the clot. That helps keep the blood clots intact in the critical hours after an injury.

Robust clots

“We were really testing how robust the clots were that formed,” says lead author Leslie Chan, doctoral student in bioengineering. “The animals injected with PolySTAT bled much less, and 100 percent of them lived.”

The synthetic polymer offers other advantages over conventional hemorrhaging treatments, White says. Blood products are expensive, need careful storage, and they can grow bacteria or carry infectious diseases. Plus, the hundreds of proteins introduced into a patient’s body during a transfusion can have unintended consequences.

After a traumatic injury, the body also begins to lose a protein that’s critical to forming fibrin. Once those levels drop below a certain threshold, existing treatments stop working and patients are more likely to die. PolySTAT works to strengthen clots even in cases where fibrin building blocks are critically low.

Researchers used a highly specific peptide that only binds to fibrin at the wound site. It doesn’t bind to a precursor of fibrin that circulates throughout the body. That means PolySTAT shouldn’t form dangerous clots that can lead to a stroke or embolism.

Though the polymer’s initial safety profile looks promising, next steps include testing on larger animals and additional screening to find out if it binds to any other unintended substances. Researchers also plan to investigate its potential for treating hemophilia and for integration into bandages.

The polymer could reach human trials in five years.

The National Institutes of Health, the UW Institute of Translational Health Sciences, the Washington Research Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and private donations funded the work.

Source: University of Washington

The post Polymer could keep soldiers from bleeding to death appeared first on Futurity.

Teens who smoked marijuana daily for about three years had an abnormally shaped hippocampus, according to a new study. They also performed poorly on long-term memory tasks.

The hippocampus is important to long-term memory (also known as episodic memory), which is the ability to remember autobiographical or life events.

The brain abnormalities and memory problems were observed during the individuals’ early twenties, two years after they stopped smoking marijuana.

Young adults who abused cannabis as teens performed about 18 percent worse on long-term memory tests than young adults who never abused cannabis.

“The memory processes that appear to be affected by cannabis are ones that we use every day to solve common problems and to sustain our relationships with friends and family,” says senior author John Csernansky, professor and chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

The study is among the first to say the hippocampus is shaped differently in heavy marijuana smokers and the different looking shape is directly related to poor long-term memory performance. Previous studies of cannabis users have shown either the oddly shaped hippocampus or poor long-term memory but none have linked them.

Previous research by the same team shows poor short-term and working memory performance and abnormal shapes of brain structures in the sub-cortex including the striatum, globus pallidus, and thalamus.

Changes that linger

“Both our recent studies link the chronic use of marijuana during adolescence to these differences in the shape of brain regions that are critical to memory and that appear to last for at least a few years after people stop using it,” says lead study author Matthew Smith, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.

The longer the individuals were chronically using marijuana, the more abnormal the shape of their hippocampus, the study reports. The findings suggest that these regions related to memory may be more susceptible to the effects of the drug the longer the abuse occurs.

The abnormal shape likely reflects damage to the hippocampus and could include the structure’s neurons, axons or their supportive environments.

“Advanced brain mapping tools allowed us to examine detailed and sometimes subtle changes in small brain structures, including the hippocampus,” says Lei Wang, also a senior study author and an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. The scientists used computerized programs they developed with collaborators that performed fine mappings between structural MRIs of different individuals’ brains.

Subjects took a narrative memory test in which they listened to a series of stories for about one minute, then were asked to recall as much content as possible 20 to 30 minutes later. The test assessed their ability to encode, store, and recall details from the stories.

Marijuana plus schizophrenia

The groups in the study started using marijuana daily between 16 to 17 years of age for about three years. At the time of the study, they had been marijuana-free for about two years.

A total of 97 subjects participated, including matched groups of healthy controls, subjects with a marijuana use disorder, schizophrenia subjects with no history of substance use disorders, and schizophrenia subjects with a marijuana use disorder. The subjects who used marijuana did not abuse other drugs.

The study also found that young adults with schizophrenia who abused cannabis as teens performed about 26 percent more poorly on memory tests than young adults with schizophrenia who never abused cannabis.

In the US, marijuana is the most commonly used illicit drug, and young adults have the highest—and growing—prevalence of use. Decriminalization of the drug may lead to greater use. Four states have legalized marijuana for recreational use, and 23 states plus Washington, DC have legalized it for medical use.

Because the study results examined one point in time, a longitudinal study is needed to definitively show if marijuana is responsible for the observed differences in the brain and memory impairment, Smith says.

“It is possible that the abnormal brain structures reveal a pre-existing vulnerability to marijuana abuse,’ Smith says. “But evidence that the longer the participants were abusing marijuana, the greater the differences in hippocampus shape suggests marijuana may be the cause.”

The study appears in the journal Hippocampus.

The National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health funded the work.

Source: Northwestern University

The post Does lots of pot as a teen blunt adult memory? appeared first on Futurity.

Scientists have discovered how cells know when they need to take action to heal a wound. The findings shed light on the mechanisms of cell migration, particularly in the wound-healing process.

The results represent a major advancement for regenerative medicine, researchers say, in which the form and function of cells are manipulated to create new tissues, and even organs, to repair, restore, or replace those damaged by injury or disease.

“The results significantly increase our understanding of how tissue regeneration is regulated and advance our ability to guide these processes,” says Pak Kin Wong, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at University of Arizona.

Follow the leader

“In recent years, researchers have gained a better understanding of the molecular machinery of cell migration, but not what directs it to happen in the first place,” he says. “What, exactly, is orchestrating this system common to all living organisms?”

The answer, it turns out, involves delicate interactions between biomechanical stress, or force, which living cells exert on one another, and biochemical signaling.

Researchers discovered that when mechanical force disappears—for example at a wound site where cells have been destroyed, leaving empty, cell-free space—a protein molecule, known as DII4, coordinates nearby cells to migrate to a wound site and collectively cover it with new tissue.

What’s more, this process causes identical cells to specialize into leader and follower cells. Researchers had previously assumed leader cells formed randomly.

Cell migration

Researchers observed that when cells collectively migrate toward a wound, leader cells expressing a form of messenger RNA, or mRNA, genetic code specific to the DII4 protein emerge at the front of the pack, or migrating tip. The leader cells, in turn, send signals to follower cells, which do not express the genetic messenger. This elaborate autoregulatory system remains activated until new tissue has covered a wound.

The same migration processes for wound healing and tissue development also apply to cancer spreading. The combination of mechanical force and genetic signaling stimulates cancer cells to collectively migrate and invade healthy tissue.

Biologists have known of the existence of leader cells and the DII4 protein for some years and have suspected they might be important in collective cell migration.

But precisely how leader cells formed—and what controlled their behavior and their genetic makeup—were all mysteries, until now.

Diabetes, heart disease, and cancer

“Knowing the genetic makeup of leader cells and understanding their formation and behavior gives us the ability to alter cell migration,” says Wong, lead author of the article that appears in Nature Communications.

With this new knowledge, researchers can re-create, at the cellular and molecular levels, the chain of events that brings about the formation of human tissue. Bioengineers now have the information they need to direct normal cells to heal damaged tissue, or prevent cancer cells from invading healthy tissue.

The findings have major implications for people with a variety of diseases and conditions.  For example, the discoveries may lead to better treatments for non-healing diabetic wounds, the No. 1 cause of lower limb amputations in the United States; for plaque buildup in arteries, a major cause of heart disease; and for slowing or even stopping the spread of cancer, which is what makes it so deadly.

The research also has the potential to speed up development of bioengineered tissues and organs that can be successfully transplanted in humans.

For the study, researchers used a combination of single-cell gene expression analysis, computational modeling and time-lapse microscopy to track leader cell formation and behavior in vitro in human breast cancer cells and in vivo in mice epithelial cells under a confocal microscope.

The work included manipulating leader cells through pharmacological, laser, and other means to see how they would react.

“Amazingly, when we directed a laser at individual leader cells and destroyed them, new ones quickly emerged at the migrating tip to take their place,” Wong says.

The National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award and funding from the National Cancer Institute funded the work.

Source: University of Arizona

The post How cells know to rush in and heal wounds appeared first on Futurity.

At the Family Dog Training Center in Kent, Washington- one of the pupils is not QUITE like the others. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Let’s just say when they pass out the bacon flavored dog treats, Amy The Pig passes.

But that’s just the school part. Amy took her Mad Skillz on the road to the Seattle Kennel Club Dog Show, and you can see the video here.

(Feature photo from The Seattle Times : Trina E. and Shirley B. sent info on this story- thank you!)

Unfortunately, Meg has not (yet) approved my airfare to Australia to meet the Quokkas for some Selfies. While I cross my fingers and pack, please amuse yourself with this Follow-Up Quokka Qollection from My Modern Met.

So says Mashable. During the “second bank holiday weekend” (had to look that one up) from May 21 to 25, Yelp London and PetPiggies are holding an event at The Proud Archivist in Haggerston.

Drinks, food, Micro Pig Snorgling, and education about Micro Pig ownership are on the agenda for the evening. (No bacon served, natch.) Wanna attend? Here’s how.

Got another entry in the Buddies series (last seen in January of this year and January of 2014 by photographer Elena Shumilova. This time around (also via Bored Panda) we see terrific shots from the camera of Elena Karneeva. (Her own site is here but doesn’t seem to be working.)

Just two days ago, we saw Mr. Knobbular Giraffe decide to snarf down some Fritos or..something. Did a good job of it, too. Mr. Buffalo Bill here must have seen that video (we’re popular in Buffalo circles, yo) and tries the very same approach in order to score some whole wheat bread. And maybe a smoochie or two!

(Squid.)

The first day of Spring isn’t until Friday March 20th. ‘Til then—rock those sweateuhs!

(BuzzFeed.)