Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs

Moving house again…

Well almost, moving addresses anyway. It wasn’t that long ago I moved from Disease of the Week to here at Disease Prone to take advantage of an offer from Field of Science. While I have been super happy here, an amazing opportunity has opened up for me to move the blog over to the Scientific American’s new community and so now I can be found at Disease Prone. I know a few others from FoS are moving too and I’ll let them say their own goodbyes but for me, I wanted to say a big thank you to FoS, it’s bloggers, readers and admin for helping me set up and being so supportive when this offer was extended to me.

At some point in the future this page may be removed so if you would like to continue following me you can find me here at SciAm with my new RSS feed or here on Facebook or here on Twitter.

Thanks FoS, I’ll see you ‘round.

No door? No problem. T. cruzi uses the window to cause Chagas Disease

For invasive pathogens the only way to survive, and consequently make you sick, is to get inside your cells. This is a rough exercise as you have an immune system working everywhere in the body to prevent this and the cell to be invaded is none too happy with the idea either so invasive pathogens must use tricks.

After evading or surviving the immune system, another post for another day, some exploit a mechanism called receptor mediated endocytosis (RME), in which the pathogen binds to a receptor on the cell triggering the cell to alter its shape to internalise the pathogen. RME is used by cells to recycle extracellular components but it a pathogen can make itself fit the receptor instead it can trick the cell into giving it free access to its insides.

Another mechanism, commonly employed by membrane bound viruses, is membrane fusion. Given that membrane bound viruses contain a secondary structure called the nucleocapsid, which houses the genome, they can fuse their own membranes with the host cell which results in the nucleocapsid's release into the cytoplasm.

(a) HIV entry by fusion and (b) receptor mediated endocytosis of light blue dots ((a) modified from credit and (b) modified from credit

Anti-cancer Fungi

Mycology, the study of fungi, is an often-overlooked member of the microbiology family. Having said that there are plenty of dedicated mycologists out there doing all sorts of cool stuff and plenty more fungal species doing all sorts of weird and wonderful things.

I have written about fungi before but only in the recent zombie posts and I feel I may have been a bit negative on fungi. Particularly when they seem to be capable of much good.

To Tattoo or Not To Tattoo

Is it something you should do or is it taboo? What about a tattoo of a kazoo?

Okay, I'll stop now.

Recently I’ve been considering getting another tattoo or more work done to complement my existing tattoo. Its not terribly scientific like the Carl Zimmer’s Science Tattoo Emporium but it does mean something to me. I think I’ll probably wait until I finish my PhD, which means I’m looking at getting it in about a year.

Ignore my camera in the top left, the tattoo is too close to my shoulder making it very difficult to get it of of shot. Anyway, it's a raven.

Treating the Bends

Last week I wrote about the Bends, a medical problem based in an understanding of physics that results in bubbles of (primarily) nitrogen in your blood if you move from one atmospheric pressure to another to quickly, typically surfacing from depth while diving too fast.

Of course I meant to point out that decompression occurs when the external atmospheric pressure drops quickly. Most commonly this occurs in divers but also happens in astronauts. I’d never really thought about that before.

Anyway I got as far as explaining how it occurs last time. This time we are interested in how you fix it.

Physics + Medicine = The Bends

About a fortnight ago I was in the unusual position of teaching human biology to medical physicists and physics to medical students. Interestingly, during this overlapping week a disease came up in both tutes, a physics based medical condition.

RSPCA Million Paws Walk recap

Yesterday (15/5) was the Royal Society for Protection against Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) major annual fundraising drive, a walk in the park called the Million Paws Walk. The idea is that people can register as individuals or as teams and by registering they raise a little money. Each individual registrant and team can also raise money for themselves to complete the walk.

Zombies Pt 2 (or how I distracted my students)

Last week I mentioned how my students sidetracked me in a tute regarding introductions to the origins of life and in particular the acronym HOMR standing for Homeostasis, Organisation, Metabolism and Replication by initiating a discussion of whether or not zombies technically were alive. Well, the following week they had a test that occupied half the allocated tutorial time so instead of letting them out early I extended the discussion to real world zombies.

Zombies Pt. 1 (or how my students distracted me)

As I mentioned a little while ago I have been made an associate lecturer for first year biology at the University I have been doing my PhD at. Most of my job is taking tutorial classes and the other week during one of these classes I got totally distracted by a very interesting discussion.

Earth Day 2011

Okay so I missed it in my timezone but like beer o'clock it’s always the right time somewhere. Earth Day is an important opportunity to look at the way we use the environment and consider ways we alter our impact for the better.

Below is an article that I previously published in the Adelaide Advertiser, the main newspaper from where I live about a much overlooked but vitally important cog in the environment, bacteria. It’s about a year old and I have mentioned it before but some of the info is worth another look.

Happy Earth Day, for yesterday.

Earth view from Orbiter (modified from)