As an animal lover who has been passionate about genetic conservation approaches since I first heard about the “Cheetah papers” over twenty years ago, I am excited at the work highlighted in two papers published in the last year that have begun the process of applying induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technologies to endangered animals (1,2).
Continue reading “From White Rhinos to Snow Leopards: Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells Offer Hope for Endangered Species”
Forgetting. Forgetting your address; your spouse; your children; your friends; your life. It is something that none of us want to think about, but it hangs over some of us like a specter. Can’t remember if you fed the cat? Where you put your car keys? Did you forget to pack your lunch or return a phone call? Maybe you are trying to do too many things at once, or maybe you are tired. There are lots of perfectly normal reasons why we all forget things from time to time, but every time I forget something there is a nagging voice in my head saying, “Maybe it is something else.” Continue reading “Remembering Not to Forget”
Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a horrible, debilitating disease that affects an estimated 3 million people world wide. My friend “Liz” is one of those 3 million. When I first met Liz, she was a bright bubbly young woman who loved crafts and entertaining. She had a huge room in her basement filled with rubber stamps, paper and other craft supplies. The first Christmas I knew her, she and her husband had four Christmas trees in their house. Liz decorated each tree with a different theme. Then abruptly she stopped appearing at the social functions she never missed. A year or so later came the news that she had been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Continue reading “Therapeutic Manipulation of N-glycan Branching: Promise in the Fight against MS?”
As scientists, we are supposed to be objective and unbiased. We are trained to use sound scientific methods and experimental design to let the data speak for itself. By doing this, we remove our preconceptions and biases from the equation, because as human beings, we are both subjective and biased. Early this summer, there was quite a buzz about an article published in PLoS Biology (1) that debunked a paper (and prize winning book) by Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) that many of us probably read at some point in our academic training as scientists. Continue reading “Skullduggery? Did Stephen Gould’s Bias against Samuel Morton Prove His Point?”
If you are of a certain age, the name “Tasmanian Devil” most likely conjures up an image of a ferocious brown hairy cartoon character that traveled in the center of a tornado of chaos. Sometimes, as in this case, the truth is much less strange than the fiction. The real Tasmanian Devils (Sarcphilus harrisii) are relatively small, somewhat cuddly looking, marsupials found only on the island of… you guessed it, Tasmania. Despite their diminutive size, they are the largest living carnivorous marsupial. Unfortunately, these terrier-sized animals are also in danger of becoming extinct, largely as a result of a deadly, infectious transmissible cancer called Devil Facial Tumor Disease (DFTD). Continue reading “The Devil is in the Details: Genetic Diversity and the Endangered Tasmanian Devil”
I guess you could say that I have been programmed to notice giant creepy crawly things. Starting when my son brought home a book about “Real Life Monsters”, my family has not been able to stop talking about one of the book’s featured monsters, the Goliath Bird Eater spider. While the book’s other stars, the giant squids and great white sharks, were pronounced by my son to be “cool”, a spider that is the size of a dinner plate and eats birds, is the thing of nightmares. Both my kids will fearfully bring up these giant arachnids anytime a hairy spider is spotted. [Note: Goliath Bird Eaters live in South America, not Wisconsin].
Given the number of family discussions I have had about gigantic arachnids, it was only natural that a headline about a hummingbird-sized ant that once roamed Wyoming caught my attention (1). Although there are living species of giant ants, the Wyoming ant is the first fossil from the extinct ant family Formiciinae to be found in the Western Hemisphere. The ant lived in the early Eocene (~49.5 Million years ago). And, unlike the cool climate insect taxa previously known to be shared between North America and Europe, this new ant, Titanomyrma lubei, was a thermophilic insect. Continue reading “The Ants Came Marching: Did Periods of Arctic Warming Help Giant Ants Migrate?”
The genetics of wild cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) populations has a special significance for me. In fact, it could be said that the population genetics of cheetahs changed my life. I first learned about the low genetic variability in cheetahs in a darkened lecture hall at Iowa State University in 1988. I was so fascinated by what I learned in those lectures about genetics and its importance in conservation efforts that I eventually changed my major to Genetics. “The Cheetah Papers” as a colleague calls them, were, and perhaps still are, common teaching tools for biology and genetics classes. And why not? The results were amazingly cool, if a bit disturbing. Imagine a population that, through a series of natural events over thousands of years, had become so genetically similar to one another as to be almost clonal.
Still, if science teaches us nothing else, it teaches us that there is always more to the story. Continue reading “Don’t Judge a Cheetah by Its Spots: New Insights into the Genetics and Evolutionary History of African and Asiatic Cheetahs”
When my my Mother’s sister, Pat, was seven years old, she was in a car-bicycle accident that resulted in some very serious brain trauma. She spent better than a year learning to walk and talk again, and although there were some lasting personality changes, she went on to earn a nursing degree and live an independent life. When I think of My Aunt Pat, I can’t help but marvel at what the human brain can do. Damaged brain tissue does not re-grow, but still the brain can find a way to rewire itself to circumvent damaged areas.
Fortunately, it doesn’t take trauma to the brain for it to demonstrate its plasticity. Our neural structures can be modified with the right training. Studies have shown task-specific increases in gray matter as a result of things such as learning an abstract skill or increasing aerobic activity. Cross-sectional studies have established that differences in performance abilities are associated with differences in regional gray matter. To me this begs the question: Can we consciously increase gray matter in specific regions of the brain? Continue reading “When Being Dense is Good: Mindfulness, Meditation and Increasing Gray Matter”
Let me start out by saying: I love sea turtles. I can’t explain why, but they fascinate me. I have sweatshirts, bags and artwork with sea turtles on them. I even make jewelry with sea turtle themes. Ask anyone who knows me; I have a thing for sea turtles. So when I came across the article “Tracking leatherback turtles from the world’s largest rookery: Assessing threats across the South Atlantic” in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B (1), all thoughts of writing about anything else were readily dismissed. How could I NOT write about leatherback sea turtles? Continue reading “Satellites and Sea Turtles: Can We Save the Last Member of the Genus Dermochelys?”
It is sad but true that the latest news has not been promising for wild tiger populations. In September, an article published in PLoS Biology (1) estimated that the best hope of saving the wild tiger population would be to shift focus to source sites, which are “…at spatially well-defined priority sites, supported by proven best practices of law enforcement, wildlife management, and scientific monitoring.” The authors estimate the cost to save these sites at $82 million (U.S). At the time of publication, $47 million had been committed by governments and other groups. It isn’t difficult math to figure out there is a deficit.
Continue reading “The Latest On: When Five Hundred Tigers Are Not Enough”