Go say Hello to Travis Saunders and Peter Janiszewski, the newest bloggers on the Scienceblogs.com network at Obesity Panacea.
They cover health, physiology, nutrition and exercise - something we did not have here on the network before, at least not in such a concentrated form. Check out the archives of their old blog and then bookmark the new Obesity Panacea.
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Go entertain yourself with the Obesity Panacea blog (previously here).
If you don’t laugh at the Ten Most Annoying Gym Personalities you need to, well, hit the gym.
Welcome Peter and Travis!
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Given that I have studied yoga therapy and work with clients in a therapeutic manner, I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I used to reject yoga posture modifications in all forms. My ego was convinced that I didn’t need to modify any pose. After all, why modify when you can force your body into a posture (I guess the ego boost you get from getting into a posture soothes some of the pain you get from injuring your body to get into it)?
Perhaps it’s wisdom that comes with age — or with lots of yoga practice — or it’s studying yoga philosophy and learning about ahimsa and how it applies to your yoga practice as well as daily life or perhaps it’s simply the understanding that yoga, like life, should feel GOOD. Of course this means shutting down the “if it feels too good that means it’s not beneficial because you have to suffer to get to the good stuff” voice. You also have to let go of the attachment to achieving all sorts of fancy yoga postures to prove that you’re a serious student (and/or teacher) of yoga. Yep, it’s heady stuff.
Some sort of perfect storm of all of these things occurred for me somewhere along the way and I realized that modification is good. This realization led to years of training in the world of therapeutic yoga. Now I’m attached to a different idea — that asana should be modified to the individual. I tend to get a little soapboxy about this, so I won’t expand upon this. Suffice to say, I wanted my body to feel good, not bad, during and after my yoga practice.
Every day I do things that don’t make my body feel so good. Whether it’s hunching over a desk and working at the computer or lifting heavy items improperly or overdoing it with landscape maintenance. My body has developed habits and compensates for imbalances and weaknesses. Pushing myself in my yoga practice only strengthens these patterns and tightens the knots I’ve spent years tying. After years of training, I realized that yoga can be used to loosen these knots and change these negative body habits/patterns. Eureka!
Now it’s not unusual for me to alter uttanasana by practicing it with one arm (alternating) rather than two when I have neck stiffness. Yes, there’s still a little part of me that’s screaming “Yoga wussy!” I smile when I hear the taunt from my inner yoga bully, ignore it, and continue with my modified practice. Over time it’s gotten me less pain, more flexibility, and less “I can get myself into all sorts of fancy postures” bragging rights. I’ll take that trade.
If you’re looking to unwind your body’s knots, I highly recommend three wonderful resources from one of my favorite yogis, Susi Hately Aldous. With these three resources, you can drain the strain from your entire body:
Remember — modifications and/or practicing yoga in a way that is different than the push-your-body-type-A-yoga you may be practicing currently isn’t a bad thing. It’s a healing thing. Your inner yoga bully may scream “You are a yoga wuss!!!” but don’t listen.
Movement for the joy of it sometimes gets lost in our yoga practices because we get so caught up in getting a posture right or doing what everyone else in the class is doing. One way I shook loose of the push it mindset was to move joyfully in my yoga practice. I took 10 minutes at the end of my practice to practice my own little brand of free-flow yoga. I followed my body’s lead and didn’t care so much about how I looked on my mat.
Another way I did it was through dance. I wasn’t the little girl who begged her mom to enroll her in dance class. I never dreamed of being a ballerina. What I did enjoy was the freedom of movement when I felt a bit more restricted in my yoga practice. Putting on music and moving was a nice way to get out of the mindset of “I must move this way.” The lovely Blisschick wrote a guest post on this very topic that’s wonderful and I highly recommend it. Click here to read it on Suburban Yogini’s blog.
Now for the yoga public service announcement of the day — modification and feeling good are good things.
Namaste!
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The odds of knowing your cousins: 23andme Part 1:
Bizarrely, Jonathan Zittrain turns out to be my cousin — which is odd because I have known him for some time and he is also very active in the online civil rights world. How we came to learn this will be the first of my postings on the future of DNA sequencing and the company 23andMe.
Just read the whole thing. This is really a matter of the humanities, not science. Specifically, the almost mystical significance people seem to put into the finding that they share genetic ancestry with people, even people who they knew and were friendly with before they knew this datum.
Also, I think this sort of thing makes hang-wringing about the ethical conundrums that genetic counselors might have in regards to paternity issues which a wife might know of, but the husband might not, seem totally ridiculous. With the plethora of personal genomic data which will likely be part of everyone’s information portfolio circa 2020 you’d have to be retarded, or very exceptional, not to notice a “extra-pair paternity event” within a family.*
H/T Dr. Daniel MacArthur.
* Exceptional as in the putative father is dead, and all his relatives are dead, or he has no relatives (e.g., only child whose parents were only children, etc.).
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Sci may have hinted that there were guest posts coming up in the near future. After that long series on female reproductive anatomy, Sci thought it would only be fair to let the dudes have some information as well. Unfortunately, Sci’s knowledge of the male reproductive system is related almost entirely to hilarious things like bicycle accidents and pens, and so she had to turn to someone a little more knowledgeable on the actual way the system works.
And so, into the breach has stepped the intrepid Ambivalent Academic! She is here to deliver the sperm, the semen, the testicles, and all other articles of male anatomy right to your computer! And it even comes without malware!
So let’s have a big round of applause for Ambivalent Academic, and Male reproductive anatomy: Part 1.
Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…
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iPods are cool. The iPod Touch lets you experience the wonders of the iPhone without the monthly data charge to AT&T. But both have a stupid problem that is a sustainability nightmare. The irreplaceable battery makes it more likely that a perfectly working gadget will be thrown away just because the battery no longer holds a charge.
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iPods are cool. The iPod Touch lets you experience the wonders of the iPhone without the monthly data charge to AT&T. But both have a stupid problem that is a sustainability nightmare. The irreplaceable battery makes it more likely that a perfectly working gadget will be thrown away just because the battery no longer holds a charge.
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When I first started my independent academic laboratory in 1992, it was in a brand new facility across the parking lot from a then 40-year-old building named in honor of the woman to the right. I took on a big teaching load from day one and while I had some cash left from the $50,000 start-up package, I didn’t hire a technician immediately. So it fell upon me to do all the ordering of the basic supplies to get the operation rolling. No problem, right? I ordered much of my own stuff as a postdoc so it should be no problem to get everything I need to start the lab from scratch.
One of the most common buffers used in molecular and cell biology labs is “Tris,” short for a base called tris(hydroxymethyl)aminomethane. By adding different amounts of hydrochloric acid to it, you can create buffers from pH 6.8 to pH 9 so it’s pretty versatile.
So, I opened the old Sigma catalog (this was when companies were only just starting to get their catalogs online). There were five varieties of Tris and nine varieties of Trizma®, Sigma’s brand of Tris base (there are now six and 15, respectively).
So which do I order? The ACS reagent grade >99.8%, the JIS special grade >99% or do I go for the BioUltra Trizma?
But the Bioultra Trizma comes in two forms, one for molecular biology and another for luminescence. I definitely needed a molecular biology grade tested RNase-free that I could also use for cell culture.
Hmmm, how ’bout the “Biotechnology Performance Certified, meets EP, USP testing specifications, cell culture tested, ≥99.9% (titration).”
And so, for each chemical I needed to start the lab I had to go through and evaluate why I needed one form over another, and what the difference was between all of the terminology.
When it came time to bring in the cultured cell lines for my work, I decided that I was going to start all of my cultures from an original, traceable stock obtained directly from a cell repository instead of the more common practice of soliciting colleagues around campus for hand-me-downs of their established lines. You never know where someone’s cells have been, how long they might have been passaged, whether they have been cross contaminated, or if they have latent mycoplasma infections.
So I knew I needed HeLa cells - those ones we’re hearing all about these days from Rebecca Skloot’s New York Times-bestselling book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, about the 31-year-old rural black woman whose cervical carcinoma gave rise to the first immortalized human cell line.
The two most common vendors for original cell culture stock are the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) and the Deutsche Sammlung von Mikroorganismen und Zellkulturen (DSMZ), or German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures. There are others, including major national research institutes, and dozens of other vendors have modified cells for a variety of specialized uses.
ATCC is a private, non-profit organization that traces its roots back to 1925 when scientists realized a need for a central laboratory that distributed certified strains of microorganisms. If you isolate your own cell line that you wish to make available to the scientific community, you can deposit it with ATCC and they will handle requests for it from other investigators, using sales fees to support their operation.
Not only does ATCC serve as a central repository but it also contributes to the continuity of the biomedical research enterprise. I had a physician-scientist colleague a few years back who was closing his research lab and moving to private oncology practice. But he had developed a series of very useful drug-resistant clonal populations of two, common human leukemia lines. These are very useful cells for investigating why cancer cells develop tolerance to drug therapy but since there would be no one left to distribute them, he deposited them with ATCC (example).
OK, so back to 1992: I open the ATCC catalog (again, before it was online) and, hmm, you’ve got HeLa cells (catalog designation CCL-2). Great. Let’s order ‘em up.
But then there are also HeLa 229 (CCL-2.1), and HeLa S3 (CCL-2.2).
Hrumph. I just want some freakin’ HeLa cells - what’s up with these other ones? They all kind of look the same, all from the same woman, all grown in the same medium.
So what the difference?
In her Los Angeles Times interview last month, Skloot remarked that the Lacks book began with a manuscript she was planning to meet the requirements of her MFA at the University of Pittsburgh:
“I was in class, and I got out a piece of paper and I wrote at the top ‘Forgotten Women in Science,’ ” she remembers. She planned to do 12 essays. “Number 1, I wrote Henrietta Lacks, and then I was like, hmmm.”
So over a series of posts this weekend, I wish to tell you about a woman in science indirectly related to HeLa cells. She may not necessarily qualify as a “forgotten woman of science” but her story is perhaps not well-appreciated today because her contributions occurred so long ago.
Florence Rena Sabin, MD (1871 - 1953), a daughter of a Colorado coal mining family, became a female pioneer in medicine and public health. With the simple notation of “S3″ she is forever linked to the first clonal population of these cervical cancer cells from the poor Virginia tobacco farmer.
Image credit: Sabin color portrait from Women in the Rockefeller Archive Center
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Two days ago I went with my daughter to the pediatrician to check out her 20 month old who had a fever and rash. Viral origin, probably. Also an ear infection. Pretty much par for the course at this time of year. But lots of little ones and their older sibs weren’t so lucky this flu season. As we’ve had too many occasions to mention, the severity of the 2009 pandemic has yet to be gauged, but trying to compare it to seasonal flu is misleading as its epidemiology is very different. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the melancholy figures for pediatric deaths.
Since the beginning of September CDC has registered 265 flu deaths in children under the age of 18. Here’s how that compares with past seasons:
Source: CDC
This is pretty dramatic, even more so when we look at the distribution within the pediatric age group. 48 deaths were in babies and toddlers (less than 2 years old), 30 in children 2 - 4 years old, 98 in the 5 - 11 year age group and 89 in pre-teens and teens (12 - 17 years old). Thus well over two-thirds of the mortality is in children over 5 years old.
For a parent or a grandparent these are chilling numbers, but they are only numbers. The late epidemiologist Irving Selikoff once referred to a statistic as “people with the tears wiped away.” A friend, referring to someone who lost a child, shook his head and just said, “It’s off the scale.”
I look at my little grandson and I look at that graph and all I can think is: Yes. Off the scale.
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So the world is finally waking up to the fact that the Bluefin tuna is in crisis. That’s nice. But decades of overfishing have pushed this majestic fish to the brink of extinction, which is not the point at which we should start thinking about conservation. The situation is so extreme that an international trade ban is now its only hope of survival. Full Story…
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