Sunspots 478

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:
Computing: Gizmo's Freeware on how to search Twitter feeds without having a Twitter account.
Health: National Public Radio reports that prescriptions of strong painkillers vary widely from state to state, indicating that they are being seriously over-prescribed in some areas. The report also indicates that overdoses of prescription drugs kill more people than traffic accidents.

This is not to belittle stress -- it can be all too real. But it turns out that two of the most widely known areas of research into stress were funded by tobacco interests, which, way back in the 1930s, hoped to show that stress, not smoking, caused cancer and heart troubles, NPR reports.

Politics: NPR reports that the, er, Ethics Committee of the U. S. Congress has made it more difficult to find out how many trips members, or their staff, take, which are paid for by lobbyists or special interests.
A Christian commentator, in Relevant, points out that Hobby Lobby is selective in acting out the Christian beliefs of the owners, and, perhaps, even hypocritical.
Science: Wired tells us why the earphone/mouse/power/whatever cords get tangled so often.
My wife and I saw our first monkey puzzle tree. It looks weird, and that's a great name.


Image source (public domain)

Sunspots 441

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to

someone else:
Christianity: Ken Schenck has a short post on different ways the New Testament authors used the Old Testament.
Computing: (or maybe politics) Leonard Pitts on how connecting with people on-line can make us not see what's around us.
Gizmo's Freeware on a site that lets you make a free web page.
Health: WebMD says that having a flu shot lowers the risk of heart disease.
Science: National Geographic reports that Eucalyptus trees in Australia deposit minute amounts of gold in their leaves, and that this might be useful in pointing miners to gold deposits underground.
Wired reports that it is possible to predict a child's ability in math by observing how well they can estimate quantities when so young that they can't yet use words.


Image source (public domain)

Reprogramming heart scar tissue, and cell signalling

I recently read an article on some of the biggest scientific breakthroughs of 2012.

One of these was that experimenters have been able to reprogram heart scar tissue -- tissue that results from a heart attack -- to perform ordinary heart functions. See reports here and here. The work was done in mice, but most likely there will be ways to do this in humans, too.

Another breakthrough was the emerging importance of proteins called G protein-coupled receptors, which proteins receive signals outside a cell membrane, and cause some sort of action inside that membrane. These receptor proteins are involved in the senses of vision and smell, in regulating heart rate and digestion, and in regulating the immune system, as well as having other functions. The DNA which codes for these proteins makes up about 4% of the human genome.

See the previous Sunspots column for links to another list of the most important scientific discoveries of 2012, and to the most interesting microscopic views of living things published in 2012.

Thanks for reading!