Look! I know some physics!

I totes had a case of the Mondays

Hi everyone – Happy Monday!

Sorry for the late post, but I was just very busy today and I am still recovering from my weekend in NYC. Here is a very quick, basic and fun fact:

The San Andreas fault runs north-south through California. It is about 800 miles long and is the fault that causes so many earthquakes out there (reason #5454687 why I will never move to the west coast). This plates on either side of this fault slip past each other (right-lateral strike-slip) and actually move about 2 inches every year. This movement has gone on since the earth was created and will not be stopping any time soon. That means in about 15 million years, LA and San Fran will end up merging into one another.

And here is a little more info for you...
(I need an accent - it always makes a person just sound smarter)

“Still Hungry for a Cure!”

Good morning friends! I hope everyone is having a lovely day! Today’s post is going to be about another interesting genetic disorder: Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS).

Every human has lots and lots of DNA. All of you DNA is packaged up ever-so-carefully by your cells and stored in coiled bars known as chromosomes. Humans have 23 chromosomal pairs: one set from your mom and one set from your dad. Problems with your chromosomes can lead to some major problems in life. And this is the case with Prader-Willi Syndrome. PWS is caused by a problem on a person’s 15th chromosome. Several of the genes on the chromosome from the mom are disrupted and turned off (science jargon: silenced due to imprinting) and/or some of the genes on the chromosome from the dad are missing (deleted). The genes messed up are ones associated with regulating appetite. This is not a disorder created by one little DNA slip-up – a bunch of things are missing. The majority of time these chromosomal issues happen randomly at the time of conception. Very rarely will a parent pass this mutation along to another child. PWS is considered a rare disorder, but a very common rare disorder. Anywhere from one in 12,000 to 15,000 children are born with this disorder.

Ok, so a screwed up 15th chromosome… but what is PWS?

People living with PWS are never full – really, they are always hungry. A flaw in the part of the brain (hypothalamus) that controls hunger makes these people constantly looking to eat. They can become consumed with thoughts of food and eating. PWS also creates a metabolism that requires a lot less calories per day than a typical person. Needing fewer calories coupled with always being hungry can be a very dangerous and potentially fatal situation - supervision is a must. This is especially true for a child. With no supervision, a child with PWS could eat themselves to death.

At birth the baby will have a low birth weight, weak muscles and seem to have a hard time thriving/gaining weight. Typically between the ages of 2-5 is when the super appetite kicks in. PWS is also characterized by social and motor skill issues, lower IQs (around 70), small stature, small hands and feet, obesity, frequent skin picking, OCD tendencies and poor/incomplete sexual development. PWS people are also usually extremely flexible. There is no cure for PWS, but with treatment and a good support group, people can live long happy lives. Further research into PWS could lead to understanding (and possibly curing) the genetics of all obesity issues.

So there is yet another example of how powerful our genes are. Next time I really need to give an example of a positive mutation – a mutation does not always create a bad outcome.

Stars: The E! True Hollywood Story

In honor of Star’s upcoming birthday, we are going to celebrate the birth, life and death of stars! Plus this is a great departure from biology and a lovely little vacation from the “how your body does this” posts I have been doing lately.

In the beginning there was a gravitational collapse of a molecular cloud reaching over 100 light years across. Just kidding – you know I take things slow for you! Around the universe is a bunch of interstellar medium (ISM). ISM is made up of mainly hydrogen and helium. These clouds of gas are happy and just hang out in space until something basically knocks into them (triggered by supernova explosion, clouds may collide, etc) and makes them unstable. Once the cloud becomes unstable it breaks apart into small chunks. This breaking apart releases lots of heat and increases pressure, causing the superhot gas to ball up and form a rotating protostar. Small protostars never get hot enough to start nuclear fusion and turn into brown dwarfs. Brown dwarfs burn cool and dim and die away over hundreds of millions of years. The big protostars will continue to get hotter and hotter and eventually get hot enough (10,000,000K) to start the nuclear fusion.

A beyond basic definition of nuclear fusion: you take two hydrogen atoms and smash them together, at such high temperatures and with such great pressure, that the two nuclei combine and turn into helium. This releases a shit-ton of energy and that is why fusion is the power source of stars.

Once a star has reached the point of using fusion for energy, it has lost most of the energy it gained from collapsing and is said to be in its main sequence. It’s now known as dwarf stars. A dwarf star is a giant ball of gas with a core of helium undergoing fusion and an outer layer of helium. The amount of helium will continuously increase since the star is constantly producing more as a product of fusion. To maintain fusion and size, the star will continue to get hotter and brighter. This is the phase our sun is in – it continues to get brighter and brighter all the time. The amount of time a star stays in this phase depends on how much hydrogen it started with. Huge stars will burn fast and live short lives, while smaller stars will burn slow and live much longer. These small stars (known as red dwarfs) will eventually just get dimmer and dimmer and burn out after hundreds of billions of years. The bigger stars (including our sun) will move on to the post-main sequence.


In about 5 billion years the sun will have used up all of its hydrogen and will start to cool. This cooling will allow the helium to expand. The sun will then be known as a red giant and will be 250 times bigger than it is now. To put that in perspective: it will eat up the earth. Eventually the core will get hot enough to start helium fusion and the sun will shrink up and heat up again. Red supergiants will burn through helium and a bunch of other elements (getting hotter and hotter with each element) until it starts producing iron. In between each element it will grow and shrink. Iron will not produce energy for a star so everything stops there.

Average stars will then shed some layers and turn into small (earth sized) balls called white dwarfs. Eventually they just fade into black dwarfs and disappear. Just like A-list stars in Hollywood, A-list stars in the sky go out with a bang. The iron core will become so big and heavy it will collapse under its own wait and explode as a supernova. The remains will blow away and leave neutron stars and black holes. We’ll talk about neutron stars another time - they are fun.

This was kind of a long and dense post, but I think it was still fun and interesting to know. But now I do have the song, “supernova girl” stuck in my head.

I shall call him Squishy and he shall be mine and he shall be my Squishy

Good morning everyone! As a little hump day treat, I’m going to tell you about one of the prettiest little animals in the ocean: the blue-ringed octopus (Hapalochlaena maculosa).

There are at least 10 members of the blue-ringed octopus family and they all live in the Pacific Ocean between Japan and Australia. Like many other octopuses, the blue-ringed octopus spends its day sleeping and its night working the tidal pools – hunting for crabs and shrimp. They are tiny little things, with the biggest family member only being only about 15cm long (about 6 inches) and coming in at whopping 28 grams (0.06 lbs). If you catch one of these little buggers resting it will look wrinkly and covered in brown spots, but the minute you spook it or get it agitated, the brown spots will darken. Specialized cells around each of the brown spots then create bright iridescent blue rings that pulsate. Scary looking, huh? Well I hope you think it’s scary – so scray that you leave the little octopussy alone.

If this octopus cannot scare you away with its colors, don’t worry, it will still get you. The blue-ringed octopus is considered one of the most poisonous animals in the world. One bite from this tiny little swimmer will inject enough toxin into an adult human to completely paralyze and kill them in minutes. There is no antivenom available. The fun thing about this toxin is that it is not actually made by the octopus.

You are about to behold an example of Mother Nature making best friends. Inside the salivary glands (throwback to yesterday) of the blue-ringed octopus lives a strain of bacteria that produces tetrodotoxin – the toxin that puts you into respiratory arrest. The bacteria produces this toxin (which the octopus has evolved a resistance to) to help the octopus survive. In return, the octopus provides the bacteria with a happy and safe home. In science, two organisms working together to help each other survive is known as a symbiotic relationship (more specifically a mutualistic symbiotic relationship since both are benefiting and neither at the expense of the other). You have seen relationships like this all the time, but this is one you may not have ever thought of.

So what have we learned today? Organisms work together, evolution can help build these relationships, a bunch of random facts about octopuses, the fact octopuses is the proper plural form of octopus, and don’t touch brightly colored things.

This is going to get stuck in your head

1. I think everyone likes the videos I have been posting.
2. I want to do a chemistry post.
3. I love love love this song - it's hilarious and is totes going to be in your head for the rest of the day. It really does give a good (basic) look at elements too. Enjoy your flashback to high school chemistry.

Mamma's spit cleans everything

Hi everyone! Sorry for the late post – I’ve been busy getting things done in the lab all morning. Today’s post is another request. Anyone that knows everybody’s favorite hipster-bear knows one of his favorite sayings, “Mamma’s spit cleans everything”, but does it?

Let’s talk about spit.

Spit (saliva) is that lovely substance that keeps all of our pillows moist on drunken nights when you cannot help but drool. It is found in all humans and in most animals. In humans it is produced in the back of the mouth by some relatively large glands (salivary glands). Saliva is made up of a smorgasbord of ingredients. Obviously it is mostly made of water (98%). The other 2% consist of electrolytes (sodium, potassium, calcium, iodine, chloride, etc.), mucus and a lot of enzymes. Enzymes are proteins with a function – these are what allow your spit to do so many different things. You can also find around 8 million of your own human cells and around 500 million bacterial cells in every 1.0mL of spit. How gross is that?

So yeah, there are a lot of ingredients in saliva to allow it to perform all of the functions we need it to help with – it’s most obvious being digestion. In addition to helping soften food up, making it easier to chew and swallow, enzymes like amylase and lipase help jump start digestion. Amylase can break starch down into sugar (your body likes using the simple sugar) and lipase helps start breaking down fats. A good mouthful of slobber also helps wash food particles out of your teeth. Proline rich proteins found in saliva give saliva it’s lubricating and mouth moistening properties. So yay spit! But does it really clean everything?

A university study found that mouse saliva contains a protein (nerve growth factor – NGF). Mice with wounds treated with purified NGF had wounds that healed twice as fast as mice with wounds that were not treated. It is beneficial for mice to lick their wounds. Humans do not have NGF so stop licking yourself; you look like a damn fool. Human saliva is known to contain several antibacterial enzymes (ex. IgA, peroxidase, lactoferrin, lysosyme). These enzymes are found in saliva mainly to help keep the bacteria population in your mouth under control. It’s important to remember that a lot of bacteria live in the human mouth and it is not a bad thing they are there. The body does need to ward off some as a way of protecting your teeth and tongue, but the antibacterial enzymes in your mouth are not in high enough concentrations to be good cleaning products. So spit alone will probably not clean everything…

…although, it may not hurt. As long as you can be sure you are not introducing new problems by spitting (read: don’t spit on something to clean it if you have herpes), spit can wipe away large particles, like dirt, just like washing under water would. I would still recommend using clean water though.

Now go out and enjoy the 25,000 quarts of spit you are going to produce in your life. Need a visual? That is enough to fill an Olympic size swimming pool.

Where do you think she is now?

This man is a major reason why I love science.

I used to want to be on this show SO badly! I was such a nerd.

Lions and Twinks and Bears, Oh My!

It is MAL weekend in DC (look it up if you don’t know what it is, but not at work) and I started thinking about bears and then I remembered learning about polar bears and so here is another post for today. Do you know why polar bears are white?

No one does. Polar bears live in very cold places (right? I bet you didn’t know that one). Since they swim to catch food, they obviously need to be very well insulated. To help, evolution gave polar bears a solid 10cm (almost 4 inches) layer of blubber and two layers of fur. Each bear has a dark thick underfur and then 5-15cm long guard hairs (this is the fur you see). They are actually so well insulted that polar bears are invisible on thermal imaging cameras.

The guard hairs are what appear to be white. The most basic hypothesis for why they are white would be camouflage – to stay protected or to stay unseen while hunting. This guess doesn’t hold up because, 1. they don’t have any real predators to hide from and 2. their hunting technique is not one that requires camouflage. Another issue with this idea is that polar bear hair is not really white. The hairs are transparent and only appear white/pale yellow when looking straight down the hair fiber. This caused some scientists to think the hairs acted like fiber-optic tubes. They could direct the sunlight right down to the polar bear’s black skin and help with staying warm. A bunch of physicists proved that wrong recently.

Science is back to the drawing board on this one. I doubt any of you will lose sleep over it, but hey, it’s a fun random fact to pull out someday. Happy MAL to all you bears out there!

They're all gonna laugh at you!

Happy Friday! I don’t know about all of you, but this week was FAR too long! I’m totes ready for a long weekend.

Today I have another request – from a college love of mine. She asks, “Well, I was just thinking of one too. It might be boring, but I thought of it when I read the tanning one. Why do you blush when you are embarrassed or on the spot or nervous or whatever?” Honey, it is never boring when I explain it! Blushing is actually a kind of strange thing that humans do. Let’s set the foundation for a good blush… (Hahaha! Get it? Makeup joke)

You are invited to dinner at the Beckham’s house with Oprah, Beyonce, Zac Efron and Wendy Williams. OMG, this is my dream dinner. I could die happy after this meal. Imagine sitting there and all of a sudden you sneeze so hard you fart and spit up all over yourself. Most people would turn bright red out of embarrassment (I would fall over and die). So what just happened?

The minute you get embarrassed your body switches into a fight-or-flight mode (the sympathetic neuronal response). This is a completely involuntary nervous system response and that means you cannot control when you get embarrassed or when you blush. Once your body is in this state, adrenaline is released. Adrenaline is going to rush through your body and cause your blood vessels to loosen up and get bigger (vasodilation) as a way to increase oxygen supply to your muscles. The more blood, the redder you look. And just like that, you have blushing! This seems straightforward, but with this explanation your entire body should turn red. Why is it only your face (mainly your cheeks) do when you are embarrassed?

Your blushing region has a relatively unique structure. Your facial skin has more capillaries in it than other places on your body. There are more, and larger than normal, blood vessels in the face. These blood vessels are also much closer to the surface of your skin. In the presence of adrenaline, all of these will dilate and will appear much redder than they would anywhere else in your body. Another quirky thing about dilation of the face is that the veins in your face will also dilate. Adrenaline does not cause vein dilation anywhere else in the body except the face. Obviously evolution wants you to blush when embarrassed (come on, you know this question is coming), but why?

Simply put, no one knows. Why should we have a visible extra blood flow to our cheeks when embarrassed? The theory I like most says blushing was created as a way of showing social intelligence. It is a visual to others letting them know that we know we did something inappropriate/not socially acceptable. A visual, “I’m sorry” can help avoid fights. Some support for this theory is that humans do not normally start blushing or understand being embarrassed until around kindergarten age. This is the time when children start to gain social intelligence and understand being judged by others.

Honey, I popped out of the womb judging and I am still going strong.

Gurl! Stop Touching Me!

This is the Mimosa pudica. A plant that grows all over the place in South America. We used to grow one in the lab I worked in at JMU.

As you can see, this is a really badass plant. The minute you touch it, it will curl up and play dead. It will bounce back and look normal again once you leave it alone for a few minutes. Acting like this is possible because of ion channels, but I'm not going to get into that - it's kind of boring.

I am going to address my typical point - why does the plant act this way? Just like humans, plants will not waste energy doing something without a purpose.

Mimosa plants are very tasty plants. Animals see their lush bushes and think, jackpot! The animal will come over, take a big bite and start chewing. The plant obviously doesn't want to get eaten so it will curl up and fall over (play dead). By the time the animal is ready for another bite the plant will look like it has disappeared. Not wanting to waste time eating a shabby bush, the animal will leave.

Thanks to evolution, the mimosa learned a cute trick to stay alive.

Way to go, plants!

I have a strict policy that nobody cries alone in my presence!

I have a request from one of my favorite (and most dedicated) readers today – I adore her. Let’s talk about crying. First, the physiology…

Crying (scientific term: lacrimate) is the shedding of tears. Tears (a concoction of water, salt, oil and protein) are produced in the lacrimal gland (tear ducts). These are cute little almond-shaped glands found at the edge of each eye. These glands are responsible for all of the tears we shed – in humans there are 3 different kinds of tears.

The first type are basal tears. These are the ones we take for granted every day. Your body is constantly producing this type of tear (almost 10 ounces a day) just to keep your eyes from drying out and getting crusty. Saltwater crocodiles cry out lots of this type of tear as a way to expel extra salt. The next type of tear is the reflex tear. When your eye is blasted with lots of dust or smoke or an onion, the nerves in your eyes get mad and tell the brain there is a problem. The brain then tells your glands to turn on the waterworks and wash all of that ish out of your eyes. The last type of tear, to me, the most interesting: emotional tears.

Emotional tears start when your brain realizes it is too happy to function, beyond depressed, scared to death, is in pain because someone just jabbed a spork in your ear – overly stimulated. The brain sends hormones to the eye and the tears start flowing. Very straightforward…but why? What is the point of crying when you’re emotional? I say it all the time – the body doesn’t do anything that is a waste of energy. I get point of the other two types of tears, but why cry when you’re sad? No other animals (except for maybe elephants and gorillas – not proven yet) have emotional tears.

What is interesting about emotional tears is that they have a different chemical composition than other types of tears. Emotional tears contain higher levels of some chemicals than their counterparts, reflex tears. Some of these key chemicals include prolactin (a hormone associated with producing breast milk), Leu-Enkephalin (known to reduce pain and improve mood), Adrenocorticotropic hormone (produced by the body in times of stress) and the elements potassium and manganeses (both known to affect mood – both are major components of depression medications). This chemical difference hints that crying may actually be a way for your body to get some of these chemicals out that make it moody. Research in this area still needs a lot of work.

As a baby tears are helpful in letting a parent know that it’s not happy. Tears are also a pretty powerful form of nonverbal communication. I don’t know. Basically, scientists still don’t know either, but I still thought it was something interesting to think about.

That's why the lady is a tramp

Alright boys, here is one for you. It’s time for our favorite extremity…the penis.

Everyone knows the purpose (well, purposes) of the penis. You all know the basic anatomy. If you don’t know either of those: 1. how do I know you; and 2. you have problems. There is, however, a little part of the anatomy you may have never thought about. It is the part near the tip that bulges out and over the shaft. This projecting border is called the corona of the glans penis. (You can google the picture for yourself if you are still not sure what I'm talking about - but this is a family blog)

I should have impressed upon you by now that the human body does not waste time making things without a purpose. So what is the role of the corona? To answer that, you need to think of humans just like every other animal in the wild.

Sex is what drives evolution. It is a constant urge to produce offspring and pass along our genes into future generations. In nature this is what drives almost everything. In the vast majority of animals, the male must compete for the female. A male will find a female, they will boom boom pow and a little while later a baby will pop out and make a proud momma and daddy. But like some human girls, some animal girls are a little promiscuous and like to sleep around. The problem with mating with a loose girl is that the male cannot be certain that he’s da baby daddy. This is where nature steps in.

I posted before how it is actually very hard to get preggers. In animals that like to pull lots of tricks, nature created a few techniques to make some men a little more likely to become a dad. Longer penis lengths and higher sperm counts are two examples. The corona is another example – and the one I think is the most interesting.

If a girl mates with lots of boys then she will be full of swimmers looking for her most recently released egg (I picture a certain lesbian friend of mine reading this and making lots of faces and hand movements). You would think she was done sleeping around, but she decides to mate with one more guy. This guy is different – he has a larger corona than the rest of them. While mating (you know what is happening) the corona acts like a scraper. As it moves backwards, it will pull all of the other competitor’s swimmers out of the way. After clearing the area, his swimmers can then take off without any competition. Yup, that simple – it just sucks all of the other competition right out of the forbidden cavern.

How crazy is that?!

Obviously this anatomy lesson does not apply to most humans. It’s crazy to think that something so simple and subtle actually has such a significant function. And for it to still be around today, it must have worked great in the past for evolution to keep making it.

But I can't help it if I have a heavy flow and a wide-set vagina!

I am about to dive in and take you where very few men (and even less gay men) have ever dared go – into what exactly is going on inside all of the girls for that week when they feel they can be uber bitches!

Don’t worry – this will not be gross and unreadable. I am invoking a lot of euphemisms.

When you look inside the forbidden cavern (uterus) you will see lovely walls. These walls were your first bed and are actually made up of two main layers: the myometrium and the endometrium. The myometrium is on the bottom and provides the foundation of the endometrium. The endometrium is divided into two layers – we will just call them the top and bottom layers.

The entire endometrium is full of spiral blood vessels. Lots of blood is needed in this layer because it needs to stay in tip-top shape. When a woman decides to love a man very much and call the stork, the stork is going to plant the egg (technically a blastocyst) right on that endometrium. The spiral blood vessels will supply the developing baby with everything it needs to get started in life! A whole new story of events then starts, but for our sake, let’s says it was a dry month and no stork came knocking.

The girl’s body spent a lot of time getting the endometrium ready for a baby, but it doesn’t believe in giving sloppy seconds. With no baby stuck, hormone (progesterone) levels drop. Right there – progesterone is a strong hormone and changes in progesterone levels can cause bitchyness. With no hormone to keep the blood vessels happy, they start to coil and tighten up. This stops all blood flow to the outer layer of the endometrium (science terms: the functional layer becomes ischaemic). With no blood providing oxygen or nutrients, this layer dies and falls off. The body then expels this will a little help of muscles contractions (imagine the muscle like a broom, just pushing the stuff right out). These muscle contractions are your cramps, ladies.

The lower level of the endometrium stays around and after all of the upper layer is gone. It will begin to get blood again from the myometrium and start to build up a new upper layer/bed for next month’s stork visit.

See, that wasn’t so bad. I’m still glad to be a boy. And to be a boy that stays away from forbidden caverns.

One Singular Deletion…

Everyone that knows me knows I love love love genetics. I have not talked about genetics yet because I didn’t want to lose people in the jargon (or out of boredom). To change that, I decided to spark your interest in genetics with a super rare genetic condition I did a project on in college: Progeria.

Progeria (aka: Hutchinson–Gilford syndrome) is a genetic disease that causes early aging. It occurs in about 1 in 4 million births. Children born with this condition look average when they pop out, but within a few months they show a lack of growth. Kids with progeria will develop normally mentally, but physically they will be much smaller, with aged looking skin, extreme hair loss and undersized jaw and face bones compared to their larger skulls. With progeria, a 7 year old will face ailments that most people will not begin experiencing until their 50s, including hip problems, arthritis, and heart issues. Unfortunately there is no treatment or cure for progeria and the condition is fatal. Most progeria patients die by the age of 13 due to heart attack or stroke.

I know! I know! Wow, Robert, way to post a sad one. I did it because I want to show you how crazy genetics can be…

You would think a person born with progeria must have a bunch of genes and DNA screwed up or missing. Here is the crazy part – only 1 thing is different. That’s it - one single difference between a normal baby and a baby born with progeria.

Everyone flash back to middle school biology and learning about DNA. DNA is made up of A, T, C and G and the order of those letters determine what the gene does. Well in the middle of your first chromosome there is a gene called the lamin A gene. This gene encodes for the Lamin A protein. 1,824 letters into this gene, a single letter is screwed up and replaced with another (wrong) letter. This is known as a point mutation. You do not inherit point mutations, nor do pass them along – they just happen. They can cause good or bad results and occur all of the time. Your body has lots of ways of trying to fix them, but that’s a whole different post. This mutation in the lamin A gene causes a snowball effect in the body and ends up making the Lamin A protein non-functional. This Lamin A protein is known to help stabilize the nucleus of cells in the body – a SUPER important job. With it not working, the nucleus is unstable and then you get more of a snowball effects until you end up with progeria.

Isn’t that crazy? There are over 3 billion pairs of letters in the human genome and a mistake in only one can have such catastrophic events.

That’s why I think genetics is amazing.

Remember how Doug was petrified of eating liver and onions?

Happy Monday!

I am struggling a little today – I’m getting sick. Blah. I’m sick from a bug or sinuses or something, but after talking to a bunch of you this morning it seems like the good chuck of you are still a little hung-over from this weekend. I linked to a post in the past about how alcohol works in your body so today I’m going to tell you how your liver deals with you and your drunkie face habits.

Flashback to Saturday night and that shot of tequila you took (ugh, my stomach just cringed). The alcohol in that shot just rushed down into your stomach where it is already being absorbed into the bloodstream. Some alcohol can be excreted from your body via sweat and urine, but the vast amount (~98%) needs to get dealt with in your liver.

The liver is such a great organ. It’s huge. It weighs almost 3 pounds. You can also cut out 75% of your liver and it will fully regenerate itself.

So yeah, the alcohol is now in your blood and on its way to your liver. It will enter your liver through the large portal vein. The blood in the vein is stoked full of stuff absorbed from the pancreas, stomach and intestines – really nasty blood. This blood mixes with some other blood that contains oxygen and moves through little channels (sinusoids).



Now you need to do some visualization. The central vein is the center of a hexagon of liver cells (hepatocytes). The liver is made up of lots of these hexagons (hepatic lobules). Each lobule is surrounded by other lobules and at the corner of each is an artery, bile duct and another vein (the portal triad). The blood with all the tequila comes into the liver via the vein in the portal triad. Then it pours out of the sinusoids and begins to move through the liver cells. As it moves through the cells, the alcohol is removed with the help of some enzymes found in the liver cells. The filtered blood then reaches the central vein where it pools and exits the liver.

Every time a molecule of alcohol comes in contact with a liver cell, it meets an enzyme (alcohol dehydrogenase) that breaks it down into another chemical (acetaldehyde). This chemical is toxic to the body so it gets broken down again by another enzyme (acetaldehyde dehydrogenase) into yet another chemical (acetate), which will ultimately be turned into carbon dioxide and water. There are only so many enzymes to go around, so the liver may need a few rounds before it can process all of your shots. There is another way your body can process alcohol, but it’s not used as commonly and I don’t feel like explaining it. This paragraph is not that bad if you read it without the words in parenthesizes.

Now think about that this Friday night while you’re downing free drinks from 11 to midnight at Cobalt.

I'm Totes the Next Ms. Frizzle

This made me laugh SO hard for SO long.

Come fly with me, let’s fly, let’s fly away!

Yaysies! I have another request: How do bugs walk across the ceiling without falling down?

Obviously this answer will depend on the bug. Mechanisms for staying on the ceiling can range from suction cups to microscopic little claws. I want to take this a step further and talk about one bug – let’s be correct, an insect – the common housefly.

Picture that annoying little fly buzzing around your house. It’s flying along, right-side up and then it decides to land on the ceiling. You (and for a really long time, a lot of scientists) would think they just do a quick barrel roll and land. Well high speed cameras can prove you wrong.

I think this is actually really badass. A fly will fly close to the ceiling and scout out an ideal landing spot. When it finds one, the fly throws its front legs up over its head and uses them to grab hold of the ceiling. Once it has a good grip, it summersaults over its front legs and then attaches its back legs to the ceiling as well. The fly lands facing the opposite direction it was flying. Now picture how fast this needs to happen - and also that the fly needs to continuously beat its wings around 300 times per second to even keep in flight.

Once it lands, the fly has two footpads (pulvilli) that secrete a sticky substance that holds the fly to the ceiling. Little tiny hairs on the footpads (setae) also help.

Simple, but still pretty sweet.

Now you know that the next time you want to kill a fly, wait until right after it lands. I’m sure they get a little dizzy and disoriented when flipping over like that.

Thank You, R. L. Stine. Love, My Childhood.

I am trying to tailor what I talk about to what people are actually interested in knowing about. So this one goes out to a friend, who apparently got goose bumps on the metro this morning.

Goose bumps (science term: cutis anserina) are the tiny bumps everyone feels, mainly on your arms, when you are cold or emotionally moved. Goose bumps are actually a very simple thing to understand so I’m going to throw in some side info too.

Let’s say you are sitting on the metro and you are cold. Or say someone in crocs was asking if they could sit next to you (which scares you to death). In either case, your brain is going to know it needs to respond and it is going to tell the sympathetic nervous system to create the needed response. Neuronal shockwaves are going to fly through your body and some are going to hit the middle layers of your skin – this is where the roots of your hair follicles can be found. Attached to each hair follicle is a tiny little smooth muscle (an arrector pili muscle).

Little aside: Arrectores pilorum muscles are smooth muscles. That means you cannot control them. You can only control skeletal muscles. So sorry kids, you cannot control your goose bumps. Back to the metro …

Once these muscles get a neuronal signal they contract and pull the hair follicle straight up. Just like that, you have a goose bump!

Goose bumps make a lot of sense in other mammals. When an animal is cold, it can raise its hairs to trap warm air next to its skin. When an animal is frightened, it can raise its hairs to look bigger than it actually is. The best example of the latter is a porcupine, which uses its arrectores pilorum muscles to raise it quills. Mice and cats do this a lot too.

In humans, egh, not so much. We don’t have enough hair to make it effective. The ability to have goose bumps is considered a vestigial trait (a trait that has lost its helpfulness). Eventually we will probably lose the ability to get goose bumps though evolution.

So enjoy them now!

Aviators were SO last year! I mean, but you totally rock them and look great!

Yesterday at the gym I saw the most amazing looking guy – a hot blonde, six foot-ish, phenomenal body, gorgeous blue eyes and the hottest smile ever. He also had a perfect little tan. Nothing crazy dark (he totes wasn’t orange) – it looked like he went somewhere tropical for the holidays.

[Picture me drooling at my desk thinking about him right now]

Anyhow… in addition to a lot of other things going on in my head, he made me think about going tanning. I got to thinking about it today at work and figured I would tell you how you tan.

In the bottom layer of your skin (science term: the stratum basale of the epidermis) there are some cells called melanocytes. Melanocytes produce melanin, a lovely dark substance that is able to absorb UV light from the sun or tanning bed. By absorbing the UV light, melanin protects your body (mainly your DNA) from UV damage. The melanin building up in your skin is what provides you with your tan. The darker your tan, the more melanin your body released.

Right there is a great science fact if you think about it for a second. A basic principle of evolution is that an organism will not waste energy doing something unless it’s beneficial. A tan that looks super cute is not helpful to your body. Your body producing a tan to protect itself is very helpful. The more sun you get, the darker you get, because the more protection you need. I really do think the human body is amazing! If nothing else comes out of this blog, I hope you appreciate science and your body a little more now too.

But you may ask: how does your body know to make melanin? The pituitary gland in your head is tied to the optic nerve. When you go outside into the sun and expose your eyes to UV light, the pituitary gland starts producing a hormone (Melanocyte-stimulating hormone (MSH)) that circulates through the blood stream. When MSH reaches the melanocytes, it tells them to start producing melanin (thus the name, MSH). Then you will start tanning. This whole process takes a little time and that is why you don’t start tanning right away. For some people (myself included) the tan will not appear for a few hours, or even until the next day.

Since MSH is needed to tan and in order to get it produced you must expose your eyes to UV light, you shouldn’t wear sunglasses when you want to tan. Some research has found wearing glasses may actually make you more susceptible to sunburns. Sunburns are a different story and I don’t feel like getting into that today.

And obviously this process is different in everyone. People with naturally darker complexions always have a higher melanin concentration. Yet no matter what color, everyone has basically the same number of melanocytes. Fun.

So there you go. And I am totes not advocating tanning. Melanin is great and all, but cancer is still a major risk. Egh, whatever, I’ll be in a tanning bed soon…

It's All Zen in 2010!

Happy New Year!

Sorry I have not been posting lately – I decided to give myself a little vaca (which was fabulous and very relaxing – thanks for asking).

Sunday morning I was talking to a friend (and fellow blogger – woot woot) and both of our stomachs started making some lovely sounds. That’s when we realized we needed to brave the cold and head out to brunch.

But stomach sounds - what a perfect post! Everyone as had one, but do you know what they really are?

The scientific term for stomach noises is borborygmus. The term is actually an onomatopoeia for stomach rumbling.

Your digestive tract is constantly working. Muscles lining the entire tract are relentlessly contracting to keep the digestive process moving along. After you have gone a few hours without eating, there is nothing really there to get passed down the digestive tract except for some gastric juices and swallowed spit. Even though nothing is there, the muscles still contract, stirring up the juices, thereby releasing gasses into your intestine. The rumbling you hear is just the gasses getting released and pushed around. Stomach noises can also be heard after eating if food is not broken down completely. Incomplete digestion increases the amount of gas in the intestine – just ask anyone with a gluten allergy or someone that is lactose intolerant.

After all of that gas is thrown around in your intestine it obviously needs to be released, but you know how that works. And if you don’t and are that ignant, you needs to get off the plane…