Oxytocin, the "Love" Hormone, can protect against addiction

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140320100514.htm

New studies have shown that the development of oxytocin, the love hormone, can directly affect how much a person will abuse drugs and alcohol.  Babies are born with a certain level of oxytocin already in their bodies, but the oxytocin system is not fully developed until about the age of three.  Experiments have been done that show children already showing signs of risk factors that lead to drug addiction at the age of four.  Doctor Buisman-Pijlman's theory is that the oxytocin system is influenced by genetics, gender, and environment.  She believes that a baby's early life must be stress free and positive in order for the baby to develop a healthy oxytocin system.

These discoveries could possibly lead to ways to prevent drug and alcohol abuse if humans could manipulate oxytocin levels in children.  Treatment could also be changed for addicts if this kind of data is now able to be taken.

NOS Themes:
Science is based on evidence
Role of motivation and curiosity

Humans Can Distinguish One Trillion Odors

Scientists have determined that humans are capable of distinguishing at least one trillion different odors.  Since the 1920's, people have believed that we could only smell about 10,000 different smells, but this was never tested.  So, fueled by curiosity, scientists from Howard Hughes Medical Institute began to test this theory.  They used 128 different odorant molecules to create mixtures.  After the mixtures were created, the scientists would let the subject smell three odors, two of them being the same.  The subject was then tollied on how many times they were correctly able identify the different odor.  In doing this, they were able to determine that a human can distinguish between at least one trillion different odors.

Themes of the Nature of Science

• Role of skepticism- The scientists did not believe what was said to be true, so they tested it themselves.
• Role of motivation and curiosity- The scientists were curious about how many odors a human could distinguish, so they tested it.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140320140738.htm

Loblolly pine genome is largest ever sequenced

Link:http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2014/03/20/loblolly_pine_genome_is_largest_ever_sequenced.html

Summary: The Lolblolly Pine is probably the most commercially important tree in the United States because it is used in paper and bio fuels. Researchers wanted to sequence the genome so that they could make the fuel more efficient. The only problem is that the genome is seven times longer than the human genome. The technology that we had was not working so a team of scientists from the University of Maryland made a program that would pre-process the sequential data so that it makes sense. The program worked and scientists were able to assemble the sequence. Through this research they found that the tree grows so big because it is so full of genetic material.

NOS Themes: Some themes were collaboration and motivation
The collaboration was between University of California ,Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Maryland who each did a little of the sequencing. The motivation is that even though it was seven times longer than the human genome they were motivated to finish.

Peptides As Drugs

Peptides are small protein fragments and are good in drugs because they can be designed for specific functions in cells. Two examples of drugs that have successfully used peptides are Insulin and the HIV drug Fuzeon.

The only bad part about peptides is that it takes several weeks to manufacture them. This makes it difficult to get large quantities of them and to test their overall effectiveness.

However, a team of chemical engineers and chemists at MIT have recently designed a way to manufacture them in a few hours. This will have a huge impact on biological science because peptides can be used for many things.

Some uses for peptides include: therapeutics, they are found in hydrogels, control drug delivery, used as probes when searching for cancer, and help us study processes in cells.

Using the same technology to synthesize the peptides, scientists will be able to combine the peptides to form large synthetic proteins.

Due to the success of this experiment, 9 more machines will be created to synthesize 100,000 to 500,000 custom peptides a year, just enough to meet the demand.

Scientists combine amino acids to form the small fragments

NOS Themes:

Science is collaborative

Science is based on evidence

Role of credibility

Role of motivation and curiosity

My article: 

http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2014/03/19/fast_synthesis_could_boost_drug_development.html

Plants Develop Weapons in Struggle for Selection

Original Article: First evidence of plants evolving weaponry to compete in the struggle for selection
Source: ScienceDaily.com
Date: March 20, 2014

Image of the Milkweed plant from www.isciencetimes.com

Summary: A team of scientists in Argentina, led by Dr. Andrea Cocucci (from the Institution Multidisciplinario de Biologia Vegetal) have been studying a species of milkweed that is found in tropical climates. They have been led to the conclusion that plants have begun to develop weapon-like structures in an attempt to outfight other plants in natural selection. Plants like milkweed reproduce by pollinators such as birds or insects which can lead to competition to use those pollinators and confrontations between the plants. Milkweed, in specific, hooks sacks filled with pollen onto birds and other pollinators which are unconsciously dropped pollinate. Sometimes, a couple of these sacks can get entangled, which is what this team thinks is the potential course of the confrontation. Their research showed that the sacks have developed biologically-unnecessary horns, but they seem to serve the purpose of preventing the sacks from tangling together.

Image of the Milkweed's Pollination
Sack with newly-developed horns

N.O.S. Themes:

• Science is based on evidence- evidence showed the milkweed plant developed horns on its pollination sacks
• Role of credibility- the research came from the Institution Multidisciplinario de Biologia Vegetal in Argentina
• Importance of repeatability- it is important they make this "discovery" more times amongst the milkweed and amongst other plant species before they jump to any conclusions
• Role of curiosity/motivation- the scientists were interested as to why these horns were developed so the researched further to find out why

Thoughts: I think it is interesting how plants even have to compete to reproduce- we generally just associate that with mammals or reptiles (for example how bears will fight for a mate). I am wondering if they have noticed these types of patterns in other plants as well? If so- why kinds of mutations and why? I am curious because I tried searching for other articles, but I couldn't find anything.

Published: March 22, 2014 – 2:22pm
By: Julia Garbuz (Hour 1)

No Smoke Detectors at Sea

Link to Article

This article discusses the danger of "dead zones" being created off the Gulf Coast. This areas lack oxygen in the water due to fertilizer runoff from the Mississippi River. The nitrogen in fertilizer creates large plankton blooms that consume all the oxygen creating what is called hypoxia. This causes huge amounts of death called fish-kills. Small microbe are able to consume the nitrate to nitrogen gas and they can do this without the help of oxygen. However, this nitrate is from ammonium in nitrification which requires oxygen. These dead zones are harmful and very difficult to reverse.

NOS Themes

Role of Credibility - This article is written by Robinson Fulwieler, a biology professor from Boston University
Role of Motivation - The writer is currently researching to find a way to efficiently reverse these dead zones.

Chris Rose

Immortalized Fern Reveals Evolutionary Standstill

A 180 year old fern was discovered in Sweden, and it was found in near perfect condition. Such good condition that even the tiniest of its cells were still intact, cytoplasm, nuclei, and all of the chromosomes were visible under a microscope. The cells were all in different stages of cell division. And after doing some comparing of ancient ferns to the ferns we have today, scientists found little difference. "The genome size of these reputed living fossils has remained unchanged over at least 180 million years — a paramount example of evolutionary stasis," wrote the authors of this paper.    

The plant was most likely preserved when hydrothermal brine seep, salty water oozing from the earth, rapidly crystallized and froze the plant. Scientists concluded that this ancient fern is virtually the same as the now extremely common cinnamon fern, and has been at an evolutionary standstill.

NOS themes: 
-science is tentative
- science is based on evidence
-science is collaborative

for more information :http://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/immortalized-fossil-fern-reveals-evolutionary-standstill-n58056