Infinitely Curious

BSN,RN, with a profound love of science. Sharing what I see, think, some of my research and work. Particularly I am interested in microbiology, evolution, and philosophy.

[asapscience]

Not again! [@itfoolsamonster]

[philosophybits]

Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (via philosophybits)

[melody-loves-science]

I love cicadas, finding their exoskeletons are always a delight.

[asapscience]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ [@warandpeas]

[thirdity]

“The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.” – Aristotle

[melody-loves-science]

"Support your local brain cells. Read" Reading is the original "google" ...

[strangebiology]

Instagram photos from Russian deep-sea fisherman Roman Fedortsov.

[asapscience]

Wait a second… [http://oppressive-silence.com/]

[melody-loves-science]

Beautiful landscape in upstate New York. Photo taken by me.

[philosophybits]

Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

Jean-Paul Sartre, The Flies (via philosophybits)

[aestheticalspace]

[melody-loves-science]

"Treat the earth well. It was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children." -Kenyan Proverb I found this beautiful. Written inside the American Museum of Natural History, NYC, NY.

[philosophybits]

Truly I say, man is a polluted stream.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (via philosophybits)

[noam-chomsky]

Education is really aimed at just helping students get to the point where they can learn on their own, because that’s what you’re going to do for your life, not just absorb materials that are given to you from the outside and repeat it

Noam Chomsky (via noam-chomsky)

[quotemadness]

I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.

Simone de Beauvoir (via quotemadness)

[thelifeisabsurd]

Have you been reading lately?

[currentsinbiology]

Wow, wow, wow, and holy crap too.

Could diabetes spread like mad cow disease?

Prions are insidious proteins that spread like infectious agents and trigger fatal conditions such as mad cow disease. A protein implicated in diabetes, a new study suggests, shares some similarities with these villains. Researchers transmitted diabetes from one mouse to another just by injecting the animals with this protein. The results don’t indicate that diabetes is contagious like a cold, but blood transfusions, or even food, may spread the disease.

The work is “very exciting” and “well-documented” for showing that the protein has some prionlike behavior, says prion biologist Witold Surewicz of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, who wasn’t connected to the research. However, he cautions against jumping to the conclusion that diabetes spreads from person to person. The study raises that possibility, he says, but “it remains to be determined.”

In a new study, neurobiologist and biochemist Claudio Soto of McGovern Medical School at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston and colleagues tested whether IAPP alone could instigate diabetes in mice. The researchers began by culturing pancreatic cells from healthy humans and from young mice that had been genetically engineered to synthesize large amounts of human IAPP. When the scientists added material from the pancreases of old engineered mice that already had diabetes, clumps of IAPP sprouted in the cultured cells. The clumps also appeared when the cells were exposed to lab-synthesized IAPP tangles, the scientists report online today in The Journal of Experimental Medicine.

Tangles of prion proteins like these cause lethal brain diseases, and a new study implicates similar protein snarls in type 2 diabetes. Scott Camazine/Science Source