Men vs. Women. What would you focus on?

       A New study has revealed that men and women do in fact view the world differently. And not just theoretically but they actually focus on different things. The University of Bristol in the United Kingdom conducted a study which asked 26 females and 26 males to veiw multiple image stills from different films. One of the images was of a man waving his hand in the air while standing next to a woman who is waving a little closer to her body. The couple appears to be on a stage waving to some kind of audience ( I believe it is an image from a scene in the movie Love Actually). The results of the study reveal that women explore more of the picture than men do. A lot of the focusing involves eyes and hands, but females also focused on nonfacial areas and often focused on areas slightly below where the males focused. This can be attributed to the westernized idea of direct eye contact being threatening. Women may be associating more of a risk with direct eye contact than males. This could also be a sign of submitting to the males. Eye-tracking technology has been used in many studies to reveal gender-differences in eye movement. This is a heavily studied topic in the feild of Biopsychology. This just means we're one step closer to seeing how the battle of the sexes really works.

Original Article:
Battle of the sexes: How Women and Men see things Differently

Anti-Inflammatory Fungus to Help Treat Cancer

The Tibetan people in the picture above are making thousands of dollars by selling caterpillars that have been infested with fungi. But why would a caterpillar fungus be worth so much?

       These little creatures have anti-inflammatory properties and are being used all over the world for medicinal purposes. Patients who follow the tradition medicinal practices either chew the worm or brew it in a tea and drink it. But this isn't just some folk medicine; studies have been done and posted in the journal RNA. A chemical from this fungus called cordycepin is an anti-inflammatory. An inflammatory response is the bodies way of protecting itself, but in cases like with asthma the inflammation happens too quickly and severely. But cordycepin inhibits the inflammation process. Not only does it just stop the swelling, but it stops the swelling at a genetic cellular level.

       It will be a while for any drug to come out officially and doctors are not recommending patients to ingest this fungus due to lack of knowledge about dosages and overdosing. Cornelia H. De Moor, the scientist of the study, advises people who are interested in this fungal anti-inflammatory to wait for medicine. With luck this fungus could lead to a new drug that can help battle cancer, asthma, arthritis, and cardiovascular disease.

 

National Geographic article on this topic:

Caterpillar Fungus Has Anti-Inflammatory Properties

My Life in DNA

       In a Genetics class I am taking this semester we were taught how to isolate our mitochondrial DNA (a circular type of DNA that we get from our mothers). We did this early on in the semester. The professors then sequenced our DNA and posted the sequence online. We were each given numbers so everyone's DNA was anonymous. We were all able to analyze our DNA using a program called Finch (Download FinchTV). This program showed peaks at bases where the DNA was clean and crisp. The more careful and the more often you isolate your DNA the better the peaks come out. We were able to copy a portion of our DNA sequence into an online database to be compared with thousands of other individuals. We used BLAST through the NCBI database. The picture below is my DNA(the top sequence) and another human's DNA(the bottom sequence). We have a 99% match! That's pretty incredible especially since I have no clue who this person may be.

 

       I was also able to compare my DNA to the DNA of others in the class by using ClustalW, a multiple sequence alignment program. My brother just so happens to be in this class also, so I decided to look at our DNA together. This is what came up:

 

 

      The asterisk under the letters signifies a match in the bases. My brother and I have a 93% match, which is actually pretty different. The reason we aren't closer than that is because we both have deletions in our DNA. I have a deletion at the beginning of this sequence and he has one a few bases in.

       The DNA that we isolated and viewed is non-coding DNA so having a deletion in this section of the DNA isn't that big of a deal. Luckily!

       Interestingly enough, I compared my DNA to a friend of mine who is also in the class and we had a 94% match. I am more closely related to this friend than I am to my own brother! It's wierd to think that you could be more closely related to someone you have never met than your own family. But mutations can change one's DNA in many ways. Since both my brother and I have a mutation in this portion of our DNA it makes sense that we would have a 7% difference.