#Journal of Biosciences

[crimsonpublishersbiosciences]

Modulating the Antioxidant Activity of Thin Layer-by-Layer Films with Polyphenols_Crimson Publishers

Abstract:

Layer-by-layer deposition of a polycation and of a cheap polyphenol, tannic acid, allows to produce thin coatings having an antioxidant activity proportional to the amount of deposited polyphenol. This means that the used probe, 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH), is able to reach all tannic acid molecules present in the film whatever their location. However, when the tannic acid containing film is capped with a few nanometers thick capping layer made of poly (allylamine hydrochloride) and poly (sodium 4-styrene sulfonate), the DPPH has no access anymore to the embedded tannic acid. On this basis, an application is proposed for the production of a packaging film containing tannic acid as a probe able to sense if the packaging has undergone some mechanical damage.

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[the-august-one]

Resources From The Leftist Feminist Philosopher

Google is so powerful that it "hides" other search systems from us. We just don't know the existence of most of them.

Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information.

Keep a list of sites you never heard of!

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.

[headspace-hotel]

i've been trying to stay off of internet and i've been active on tumblr because I'm too exhausted to do things I normally enjoy. Anyway

Animal enjoyers are mad about the slightly edited wolves that Colossal Biosciences is claiming are "dire wolves." Lots of them didn't read the articles, which would provide more information. However, the journalism about this has been god-awful anyway.

The company is concurrently working on cloning endangered red wolves and figuring out how to bring red wolf/coyote hybrids back into the red wolf gene pool, as per the Time article about it. The project includes one of the biggest names in canid genomics and evolution including pertaining to red wolves, so I am optimistic that red wolves are probably the real aim of the project and the dire wolf bullshit is just a snazzy jurassic park style tagline to snare investors.

However the grift has grifted too close to the sun as according to washington post, trump is using "de-extinction" technology as an excuse to gut the endangered species act (i can't actually read the article unfortunately). The cost of this lie could be very high if the general public thinks that bringing back an extinct species can be easily done by just going into the DNA of an animal that looks sort of similar and tweaking it.

Also somehow, even more infuriating to me, this is going to eternally fuck up the perception of what a dire wolf actually was. As per wikipedia, Aencyon dirus was not closely related to any modern wolves. It is over 5 million years separate from them. It was essentially not a "wolf" at all. You might as well try to create a dire wolf by modifying a jackal or an African wild dog. You might as well call the dire wolf a dire jackal or a dire dog.

Dire wolves were not that much bigger than wolves. They were maybe 20% bigger and their size range overlaps with the northern-most wolves of today.

Even the articles critical of the supposed "de-extinction" are fucking it up! The not-actually-legit "dire wolf" puppies have white fur, and the journalists are uncritically repeating the idea that dire wolves were white, when that isn't something we know about them. The white fur is based off of the fantasy creature of the same name in Game of Thrones.

That's just flat-out embarrassing.

[klevxander]

Here are some search sites you may have never heard of because Google is so powerful it "hides" them from us. science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed. repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science. bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries. link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols. worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where the rarest book you need is near you. refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

[innspubnet]

Author Instruction of the International Journal of Biosciences | IJB

International Journal of Biosciences | IJB publishes high-quality original research papers together with Review articles and short-communication. Submission of a manuscript to IJB implies that it is not under consideration by any other journal, and no part has been published elsewhere, with the exception of a short abstract. All of the authors have to be aware of the submission. Author…

[dizzyrobinsims]

Cat Scratch fever?

From the journal of a paranormal expert:

"It is debated whether many of the personality and interests of plantsims are inherited or cultural. One expression of a Nepeta cataria simplanta I have interviewed leads us towards the latter. A student of the Foxbury Institute, Gianna Marks is a student of biology who received the gift while caring for the college community gardens.

"I was right by the Cat Nip when it happened." Marks' states. "I never liked cats, and am still allergic to them. You'd think becoming a cat magnet would come with a cure for that, but nope." She blew her nose as a stray cat rubbed against her. I inquired about why she has not sought a cure for her state. "I mean, I love everything else about being a plantsim. My master's is in plant bioscience and this has pushed my ideas way ahead. Also, do you know how much money I've saved on food? And the campus pays for the water bill for the dorms." She pauses to let out a loud sneeze as another cat rolls at her feet. "Maybe after I finish my doctorate," she concedes.

Sim #2 for the CAS Challenge: Create-A-Plant because I cannot resist plant sim shenanigans. I rolled cat nip for the second one, but originally wasn't inspired so I made my 3rd one first. (Yes I made 3 shhhh.) But then it hit me- a Cat Nip plant sim who *does not like cats, and is in fact allergic*. I then searched for cat poses as I did not have any, and to my delight @j3lly-fish actually had the PERFECT POSE PACK for this idea. Sometimes things line up way too perfectly.

[mindblowingscience]

Metamorphic proteins can be thought of as the "shapeshifters" of human, animal and bacterial cells. Their ability to drastically switch between two different shapes enables them to adapt to changing environments and carry out diverse functions. Little is known about how metamorphic proteins transform despite their usefulness in living organisms. To help tackle this mystery, a new paper in the "Perspectives" section of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) offers a "bold theory," said co-author John Orban, a professor in the University of Maryland's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research (IBBR).

Continue Reading.

[floridaboiler]

Google is so powerful that it "hides" other search systems from us. We just don't know the existence of most of them.

Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information.

Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free 

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Paleoclimate and human activity shaped the Araucaria forest in Brazil

The study used advanced DNA sequencing techniques, machine learning and analysis of fossil pollen records to investigate the history of this forest formation.

The Araucaria forest in southern and southeastern Brazil has a complex history, influenced by climatic and human factors. Araucaria angustifolia, the dominant tree in this forest formation, provides food and shelter for various species, including humans. A study conducted by an international collaboration of researchers used advanced DNA sequencing techniques, machine learning and analysis of fossil pollen records to investigate the past expansions and contractions of the Araucaria forest and to identify the impact of past climate and the activity of ancestral human groups on this process. The results were published in the journal Ecography.

“Both climatic and human factors have played an important role in the dynamics of the Araucaria forest. However there are significant differences between the process that took place on the Southern Plateau of the Brazilian territory and the one that took place in the Mantiqueira Mountains, which stretches across the states of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais. And this could be related to the more intense human occupation in southern Brazil,” says Mariana Mira Vasconcellos, postdoctoral student at the Institute of Biosciences of the University of São Paulo (IB-USP) and first author of the study.

The researcher explains: “The expansion of the Araucaria population in the Southern Core began during the last Glacial Period, around 70,000 years ago, long before the presumed date of human arrival in South America, which contradicts the idea of an anthropogenic expansion. Instead, we interpret this initial expansion as a response to the climatic changes of the Upper Pleistocene. The wetter and colder climate of this period would also have caused the expansion of other Araucaria species in Australia and New Caledonia. The isolated Mantiqueira population, on the other hand, only expanded very recently, around 3,000 years ago. Although this may have occurred in response to a brief climate cooling event in the Holocene and increased summer monsoon rainfall in South America between 4,000 and 3,300 years ago, a possible impact of human settlements in southeastern Brazil cannot be ruled out.”

However, Vasconcellos points out that this should not be taken as a proven fact, since archaeological evidence of human settlements in the Mantiqueira is scarce compared to that of the Southern Plateau of Brazil.

Continue reading.

[crimsonpublishersbiosciences]

An Alternate Form of the Integrated First-Order Rate Equation_Crimson Publishers

Abstract:

Derivation of a first-order equation suitable for use in beginning energy science and chemistry courses is shown to be

A = Ao/ 2t /t1/2

Where,

Ao is the original amount of the sample

A is the amount

T is time t and

t1/2 is the half-life

Ao is larger than A

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[victusinveritas]

Google is so powerful that it "hides" other search systems from us. We just don't know the existence of most of them.

Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information.

Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.

Source here.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from EcoWatch:

A new report from a team of international scientists has revealed harsh realities on Earth, with 25 of 35 planetary vital signs reaching record extremes. Without immediate action, scientists warn that these extremes could threaten life on Earth.

In the new study, published in the journal BioScience, scientists presented a stark look at the state of the climate crisis.

“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis,” the scientists wrote.

Scientists use 35 different planetary vital signs to track the effects of climate change, including human population, global tree cover loss, meat production per capita, energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, ice mass changes, glacier thickness and more.

Twenty-five of these vital signs are already breaking records, including human population, coal and oil consumption, ruminant livestock populations, U.S. heat-related deaths, carbon emissions, methane levels, fossil fuel subsidies, ocean heat content changes, ocean acidification, glacier thickness and tree cover loss, among others.

According to the scientists, the human population is increasing by around 200,000 people per day, while ruminant livestock populations are increasing by around 170,000 animals per day. They also found that fossil fuel consumption increased 1.5% in 2023.

A separate report, the 2024 Forest Declaration Assessment, recently confirmed a decrease in tree cover, with 6.3 million hectares of land deforested in 2023.

Although the scientists did find that renewable energy consumption increased in 2023, renewables are still not overtaking fossil fuel demand enough to limit severe impacts of climate change.

Further, scientists warned that atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane concentrations have reached record highs, the average surface temperature of the Earth is at a record high, ocean acidity has broken records, ocean heating is at an all-time high, and global sea levels are at the highest amounts ever recorded. 

On the other hand, Greenland and Antarctic ice masses have reached record lows, and the average global glacier thickness is at an all-time low.

We are already seeing the devastating impacts of these vital signs hitting extremes, with a 117% increase in heat deaths in the U.S. from 1999 to 2023. Last year, areas across Asia experienced deadly heat waves that killed thousands of people, the report authors warned.

Now, the U.S. is facing two back-to-back hurricanes amid rising ocean temperatures, which have nearly doubled in the past two decades, a recent report from EU Copernicus found.

[karadin]

online resources

Google is so powerful that it "hides" other search systems from us. We just don't know the existence of most of them.

Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information.

Here's a list of sites you may have never heard of!

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents,

thanks Christopher Seymore for links

[bpod-bpod]

Maternal Sperm

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA - located in a cell's mitochondria not in the nucleus with the majority of our gene-encoding sequences) is only inherited from the mother. This study in fruit flies reveals how a protein called Poldip2 ensures maternal inheritance of mtDNA by regulating elimination of paternal mtDNA during late sperm development

Read the published research article here

Image from work by Ziming Wang, Tirawit Meerod, Nuria Cortes-Silva and Ason C-Y Chiang, and colleagues

Gurdon Institute, Cambridge and School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, UK

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in The EMBO Journal, February 2025

You can also follow BPoD on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Bluesky

[lenbryant]

Search Engines that aren't Google:

Via Darren Cousins, July 29, 2022

Shared with Public

Google is so powerful that it "hides" other search systems from us. We just don't know the existence of most of them.

Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information.

Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved on our archive

As a new stronger covid strain spreading across Europe is identified, Zoe Beaty looks at the symptoms and how we’re still living with the virus four years after the world went into lockdown

Her morning coffee was the first clue. Earlier in the summer, Rebecca Jones made her usual pot at 8am, and took the much-awaited first sip. Only, it tasted off. “It was just horrible,” says Jones. She’d tasted it once before, back in 2020. “That’s when I knew it was Covid.”

During this year’s unsettled summer, Covid has been quietly lurking in the background of many people’s lives. Four years ago, the sense of urgency was still in its infancy – we would still experience two more nationwide lockdowns and UK death figures would reach 227,000 by May of 2023. Worldwide, that toll stretched to more than 7 million. We wore masks, we distanced ourselves, isolated – and worried.

The road back to normality was long and arduous, but very sweet for the majority. Our simplest pleasures – hugging, holidaying, not worrying about where a surgical mask is – for a while were consistently vocalised. It made sense that much of the thrill of being able to nip for a pint after work or do a food shop without queuing wore off relatively quickly.

For a while, it was almost a surprise when someone told you they’d tested positive. Isolation seemed silly again. But now, that confidence is steadily being chipped away at. A morsel of fear is back – but this time with little to no solid advice. And with a wider perspective of the new threat that long Covid poses.

Reports earlier this year found that up to two million people are living with long Covid in the UK, or one in 20 people who have contracted the disease. And according to experts a new ‘stronger’ variant is now spreading across Europe. First identified as the XEC strain in Germany in June, global health experts believe that it could be the dominant variant within months and cause a new spike when the weather turns colder.

Symptoms include tiredness, difficulty sleeping, shortness of breath and chest pain, among many others. The latest UK figures show there has been a 4.30 per cent rise in Covid cases week-on-week and England reported 1.465 hospital admissions up until August 30. Detailed data is still being collected on the new variant.

Most people will get better within a few weeks, but for others it could take longer to recover. People who smoke or who are overweight, who have been admitted to hospital due to the severity of their Covid symptoms in the past . or who live in deprived areas are most at risk. Age is also linked to “persistent symptoms”.

“Over the last few years, Covid-19 has become an illness that we have learnt to live with. But that does not mean it’s not still a deadly disease,” says Professor Mark Wass, head of the University of Kent’s School of Bioscience. “Data from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) shows that over the last few months there have been 100-200 deaths related to Covid-19 per week.

“While Covid-19 is still deadly, for many symptoms are now similar to a cold – but there is always the risk of long Covid,” Wass adds.

This year’s “summer Covid wave” – a rise in cases – is difficult to prove. “The surveillance of Covid cases in the UK is far less intensive than it once was, so it is more difficult to track the rise and fall of waves of infection, or to assess the severity of different variants, or to know how effective the vaccines are against them,” Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, told the British Medical Journal (BMJ) recently.

In our homes, the trend has followed suit. Most of us now only test as an afterthought. None of us are sure if old Covid tests are out of date. And we’re reluctant to spend £29.99 for one.

While it is hard to track infections, there has been an increase in the number of cases where Covid is recorded on death certificates in the UK in the past months. After a spike in January and February, numbers fell sharply until May when the lowest number of deaths in a week stood at 93, before climbing again above 200 on several weeks in July and August.

Being vaccinated reduces the risk of contracting long Covid by four times, some studies suggest – but, right now, only the most vulnerable are able to access a booster vaccination. Government vaccine advisers, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) and the JCVI (Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation) closed the spring campaign offering boosters to the over-75s, people in care homes or those who are immunosuppressed – on 30 June.

Wass says that vaccine programmes are now seasonal, no autumn vaccine programme has been announced – those who wish to be vaccinated must now pay £45 to £99 for a booster. “If you are eligible, then the advice is to get vaccinated. We know that the immunity offered by vaccines reduces over time, so getting vaccinated offers the best protection.”

Anecdotally at least, those unable to get boosters who catch the virus appear to be feeling the after-effects. And since knowledge of long Covid will only increase as the years go by, we’re learning of more cases or more severe cases.

One friend was diagnosed with Parsonage-Turner syndrome – a neurological condition that causes sudden, severe pain in the shoulder and upper arm – after contracting Covid in June. Despite being a healthy 39-year-old who regularly works out, he’s now living with consistent pain and weakness, which can last for months.

“At first I thought it was arthritis,” he tells me. About a week before he felt “unbelievably sharp pains” across his shoulder and he’d begun to experience brain fog and feeling faint. “The next day I was bedridden and by the end of day three I had a rash across my body.” The initial symptoms went away relatively quickly – but since then he’s been left with an incurable condition.

“The doctors said it was probably the virus attacking my joints,” he explains. “It means I can’t lift anything remotely heavy with my left arm. It’s been incredibly debilitating – especially as weight lifting is how I stave off depression.”

Others express the same difficulties and frustrations – at GPs who “treat it just like another germ”, or being “horrified and upset that no one tests these days, and expects you to be okay after a couple of days”. Olivia, 35, whose name has been changed, has been dealing with long Covid for almost a year. “It’s crazy being someone whose life has been so affected by Covid, and having these conversations with friends who are going around knowing they’ve got Covid, going to work, all those things.

“Because there’s no acknowledgement by society that it’s a bad thing if you catch it, or it can be. It’s way higher than you think.” Next week Olivia will move in with her boyfriend who contracted long Covid this summer. “We’re partly moving in so I can help look after him. A lot of the symptoms are the same as I’ve had.

“It seems mad that both of us could have it. But that seems to be the situation.”

Olivia had to take three months off her role as a programme director to try and recover – greatly affecting her work – an experience that millions of others share, some of them in extremes. This week the Wall Street Journal reported that “long Covid knocked a million Americans off their career paths”. “Years after infection, even answering email remains arduous for some,” they found.

BBC Breakfast recently ran a 15-minute segment on those who have contracted ME, or chronic fatigue syndrome, as a result of contracting Covid. They reported on cases such as young newlyweds James and Karen Hargrave.

While Karen, who has launched a campaign – There for ME, to raise awareness of their experiences – recovered from the virus and ME enough to go back to work part-time, her husband, previously a keen runner, can no longer function. He is now unable to speak – she hasn’t heard his voice in a year – and he struggles to swallow.

Rebecca Jones, from Holton-le-Clay in Lincolnshire, also contracted long Covid the first time she caught the virus. It left her with alopecia and fatigue and even caused her to fail a memory test for dementia, which she says was “terrifying”.

This time she’s been left with “ghost smells”, and disruption to her senses. Now, she’s unable to get vaccinated, despite previously being on the vulnerable list and can’t afford to pay for a private vaccine. Her menopausal hot flushes, which had been dormant for two years before she contracted Covid, have come back and have not stopped since, she says.

“I’ve even emailed my MP,” she says. “But I was just sent the same advice word for word as is on the NHS website. I can’t get vaccinated, even though I want to. In our group of friends, I’ve seen people get Covid and just ignore it and go down to the local. I just thought, how can you be so irresponsible?”

“If you have Covid-19, then the advice is the same as for other contagious respiratory diseases,” says Wass. “We should try to reduce their spread by trying to stay at home and avoiding contact with people.”

Still, many aren’t – or can’t – adhere to that advice. The disruption to work and personal lives has already been great and, while hybrid working continues to help stop the spread of infection of any kind, workers rely on the discretion of their employers to support those experiencing chronic conditions like long Covid. In the US, the condition has been registered as a disability, though it’s yet to be determined in the UK.

In the coming months and years, experts say we’ll be subject to more “waves” as the disease is “driven by a combination of new variants and a partial waning immunity to infection”, Woolhouse told the BMJ.

Will we begin to see a more conscientious approach to dealing with the virus? Those suffering the long-term effects warn that we should.