Generated Ice Cream Flavors: Now It’s My Turn

Baby Tortoises Show Up In The Galapagos For The First Time In Over A Century

 There hadn’t been one single baby tortoise sighting in more than a century on the Galapagos Island of Pinzon, until a small group of the tiny, shelled youngsters were spotted this year.

The recent births are helping to pull the critically endangered animals back from the brink of extinction after they were nearly laid to waste as a result of human activity.

This is huge news for a species that has been struggling to survive for a century, relying on humans raising young tortoises bred in captivity until they are large enough to not fall prey to rats and predators.

One of my favorite things about biology is that there are so many diagrams like this that look like shitposts if you remove any and all context from them

How Printing a 3-D Skull Helped Save a Real One

What started as a stuffy-nose and mild cold symptoms for 15-year-old Parker Turchan led to a far more serious diagnosis: a rare type of tumor in his nose and sinuses that extended through his skull near his brain.

“He had always been a healthy kid, so we never imagined he had a tumor,” says Parker’s father, Karl. “We didn’t even know you could get a tumor in the back of your nose.”

The Portage, Michigan, high school sophomore was referred to the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, where doctors determined the tumor extended so deep that it was beyond what regular endoscopy could see.

The team members needed to get the best representation of the tumor’s extent to ensure that their surgical approach could successfully remove the entire mass

“Parker had an uncommon, large, high-stage tumor in a very challenging area,” says Mott pediatric head and neck surgeon David Zopf, M.D. “The tumor’s location and size had me question whether a minimally invasive approach would allow us to remove the tumor completely.”

To help answer that question, teams at Mott sought an innovative approach: crafting a 3-D replica of Parker’s skull.

The model, made of polylactic acid, helped simulate the coming operation on Parker by giving U-M surgeons “an exact replica of his craniofacial anatomy and a way to essentially touch the ‘tumor’ with our hands ahead of time,” Zopf says.

Just as important, it also allowed the team to counsel Parker and his family by offering them a look at what lurked within — and, with the test run successfully complete, what would lie ahead.

A ‘pretty impressive’ model

The rare and aggressive tumor in Parker’s nose is known as juvenile nasopharyngeal angiofibroma, a mass that grows in the back of the nasal cavity and predominantly affects young male teens. Mott sees a handful of cases each year.

In Parker’s case, the tumor had two large parts: one roughly the size of an egg and the other the size of a kiwi. The mass sat right in the center of the craniofacial skeleton below the brain and next to the nerves that control eye movement and vision.

“We were obviously concerned about the risks involved in this kind of procedure, which we knew could lead to a lot of blood loss and was sensitive because it was so close to the nerves in his face,” says Karl, who praised the 3-D methodology used to aid his son. “It was pretty impressive to see the model of Parker’s skull ahead of the surgery. We had no idea this was even possible.”

Zopf, working with Erin McKean, M.D., a U-M skull base surgeon, was able to completely remove the large tumor. Kyle VanKoevering, M.D., and Sajad Arabnejad, Ph.D., aided in model preparation.

Through preoperative embolization, the blood supply to the tumor was blocked off the day before surgery to decrease blood loss. A large portion of the tumor was then detached endoscopically and removed through the mouth. The remaining mass under the brain was taken out through the nose.

Doctors took pictures of Parker’s anatomy during the surgery and, later, compared it with pictures from the model. They were nearly identical.

“Words alone can’t express how thankful we are for Parker’s talented team of surgeons at Mott,” says his mother, Heidi. “Parker is back to his old self again.”

Powerful potential

Although medical application of the technology continues to gain attention, it isn’t entirely new. Zopf and Mott teams have used 3-D printing for almost five years.

Groundbreaking 3-D printed splints made at U-M have helped save the lives of babies with severe tracheobronchomalacia, which causes the windpipe to periodically collapse and prevents normal breathing. Mott has also used 3-D printing on a fetus to plan for a potentially complicated birth.  

“We are finding more and more uses for 3-D printing in medicine,” Zopf says. “It is proving to be a powerful tool that will allow for enhanced patient care.”

Based on success in patients such as Parker and continued collaboration, it’s a concept that appears poised to thrive.

“Because of the team approach we’ve established at the University of Michigan between otolaryngology and biomedical engineering, the printed models can be designed and rapidly produced at a very low cost,” Zopf says. “Michigan is one of only a few places in the nation and world that has the capacity to do this.”

The folks over at NASA just featured this nifty infographic on APOD about detecting objects in the sky:

How to Identify that Light in the Sky

What is that light in the sky?

Perhaps one of humanity’s more common questions, an answer may result from a few quick observations.

Image: HK (The League of Lost Causes)

For example — is it moving or blinking? If so, and if you live near a city, the answer is typically an airplane, since planes are so numerous and so few stars and satellites are bright enough to be seen over the din of artificial city lights.

If not, and if you live far from a city, that bright light is likely a planet such as Venus or Mars — the former of which is constrained to appear near the horizon just before dawn or after dusk.

Sometimes the low apparent motion of a distant airplane near the horizon makes it hard to tell from a bright planet, but even this can usually be discerned by the plane’s motion over a few minutes. Still unsure?

The above chart gives a sometimes-humorous but mostly-accurate assessment. Dedicated sky enthusiasts will likely note — and are encouraged to provide — polite corrections.

What makes fireworks colorful?

It’s all thanks to the luminescence of metals. When certain metals are heated (over a flame or in a hot explosion) their electrons jump up to a higher energy state. When those electrons fall back down, they emit specific frequencies of light - and each chemical has a unique emission spectrum.

You can see that the most prominent bands in the spectra above match the firework colors. The colors often burn brighter with the addition of an electron donor like Chlorine (Cl). 

But the metals alone wouldn’t look like much. They need to be excited. Black powder (mostly nitrates like KNO3) provides oxygen for the rapid reduction of charcoal © to create a lot hot expanding gas - the BOOM. That, in turn, provides the energy for luminescence - the AWWWW.

Aluminium has a special role — it emits a bright white light … and makes sparks!

Images: Charles D. Winters, Andrew Lambert Photography / Science Source, iStockphoto, Epic Fireworks, Softyx, Mark Schellhase, Walkerma, Firetwister, Rob Lavinsky, iRocks.com, Søren Wedel Nielsen

Bonus comic!

Yahoo! Einstein was right again! :D We now have our first detection of gravitational waves! 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/science/ligo-gravitational-waves-black-holes-einstein.html?_r=0

http://www.space.com/17661-theory-general-relativity.html

Scientists just figured out why poison ivy makes us itch so much

Leaves of three, let them be.

An international team of researchers has finally decoded the science behind a plant responsible for no small degree of human misery: poison ivy.

For the first time, we now know why poison ivy leaves – the bane of campers, hikers, and overly curious kids alike – make us itch, and the answer lies in a key molecule called CD1a, which scientists have long known about but didn’t fully understand until now.

“For over 35 years we have known CD1a is abundant in the skin,” says researcher Jerome Le Nours from Monash University in Australia. “Its role in inflammatory skin disorders has been difficult to investigate and until now has been really unclear.”

One of the reasons for that lack of clarity has been that many experiments on skin disorders involve animal testing – specifically lab mice. And mice don’t produce CD1a, effectively creating a kind of ‘blind spot’ in the studies up to this point.

To get around this and examine whether CD1a might play a part in how human skin reacts when we brush up against poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) and similar rash-inducing plants, the researchers genetically engineered mice that did produce the molecule.

In doing so, the team found that CD1a – a protein that plays an important role in our immune systems – triggers a skin-based allergic reaction when we come into contact with urushiol, the allergen that functions as the active ingredient in plants like poison ivy, poison oak, and poison sumac.

When urushiol interacts with skin cells called Langerhans cells, the CD1a proteins (which are expressed by Langerhans cells) activate the immune system’s T cells. In turn, the T cells produce two proteins – interleukin 17 and interleukin 22 – which cause inflammation and itchiness.

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The actual position of a particle in an ocean wave. (Source)

Listening To Music Releases Dopamine In The Brain

Have you ever been listening to a piece of music and experienced   intense pleasure, even chills? Valorie Salimpoor and team (2010)   conducted research that shows that listening to music can release the   neurotransmitter dopamine.

A wide range of music — The researchers used PET   (positron emission tomography) scans, fMRI, and psychophysiological   measures such as heart rate to measure reactions while people listened   to music. The participants provided music that they said gave them   intense pleasure and chills. The range of music varied, from classical, folk, jazz, elecronica, rock pop, tango, and more.

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