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Thursday, April 17, 2008
RelationPits and Commitment Suicide
CNN: "Pit bulls kill cancer boy's miniature horse"
"A miniature horse named "Anniversary" was annihilated by a pack of pit bulls on the loose. As if that wasn't sad enough, the horse was a gift to a toddler-aged brain cancer patient (aka "cancer boy") from the Make A Wish Foundation, which lacks the funds to replace the horse or provide psychiatric counseling to the traumatized tot. Leave it to CNN.com to take a sad, horrific story and churn out a humorously befuddling headline."Source: cnnistheworstever
Mutate Ribosomes and Live Longer
"What we noticed right away was that the long-lived strains always had mutations in the large ribosomal subunit and never in the small subunit," said the study's lead author, Kristan Steffen, a graduate student in the UW Department of Biochemistry. The researchers also tested a drug called diazaborine, which specifically interferes with synthesis of the ribosomes' large subunits, but not small subunits, and found that treating cells with the drug made them live about 50 percent longer than untreated cells. Using a series of genetic tests, the scientists then showed that depletion of the ribosomes' large subunits was likely to be increasing life span by a mechanism related to dietary restriction — the TOR signaling pathway.In this project, the UW researchers studied many different strains of yeast cells that had lower protein production. They found that mutations to the ribosome, the cell's protein factory, sometimes led to increased life span. Ribosomes are made up of two parts — the large and small subunits — and the researchers tried to isolate the life-span-related mutation to one of those parts.