Flannel Shirt

Saturday in the rhododendron gardens

One day Spring arrived in Portland and everything bloomed. Drive down any street and you're treated to magnificent views of lovely flowers. There is a tree with pink flowers next to where I park my car in my apartment complex, and for the last few days my car has looked like a float in the Rose Parade. The town is awash in flower petals, either on their respective plants and trees, cluttering the gutters, or stuck to my car.

Saturday Joan took me to a rhododendron garden in southeast Portland. The air was perfumed with the blooms.

A goose hissed at me, but mostly they found ways to ignore us.

Wear your iPod

Or solar panels.

Music: What Parrington Knew

What Parrington Knew.

Vernon Louis Parrington, in a letter to a friend, expressed the problem of the power of government versus private wealth. He nailed it for the Gilded Age. The same dilemma applies today.

Norwegian sludge is a whole new thing (but has been around a long time)

Not sure what it is? Neither are scientists.

Humankind's remotest relative is a very rare micro-organism from south-Norway. The discovery may provide an insight into what life looked like on earth almost one thousand million years ago.

Biologists all over the world have been eagerly awaiting the results of the genetic analysis of one of the world's smallest known species, hereafter called the protozoan, from a little lake 30 kilometer south of Oslo in Norway.

When researchers from the University of Oslo, Norway compared its genes with all other known species in the world, they saw that the protozoan did not fit on any of the main branches of the tree of life. The protozoan is not a fungus, alga, parasite, plant or animal.

"We have found an unknown branch of the tree of life that lives in this lake. It is unique! So far we know of no other group of organisms that descend from closer to the roots of the tree of life than this species. It can be used as a telescope into the primordial micro-cosmos," says an enthusiastic associate professor, Kamran Shalchian-Tabrizi, head of the Microbial Evolution Research Group (MERG) at the University of Oslo.

His research group studies tiny organisms hoping to find answers to large, biological questions within ecology and evolutionary biology, and works across such different fields as biology, genetics, bioinformatics, molecular biology and statistics.

World's oldest creature

Life on Earth can be divided up into two main groups of species, prokaryotes and eukaryotes. The prokaryote species, such as bacteria, are the simplest form of living organisms on Earth. They have no membrane inside their cell and therefore no real cell nucleus. Eukaryote species, such as animals and humankind, plants, fungi and algae, on the other hand do.

The family tree of the protozoan from the lake near Ås starts at the root of the eukaryote species.

"The micro-organism is among the oldest, currently living eukaryote organisms we know of. It evolved around one billion years ago, plus or minus a few hundred million years. It gives us a better understanding of what early life on Earth looked like.," Kamran says to the research magazine Apollon.

Music Friday: New Blue Spaces For Candy Hat People

New Blue Spaces For Candy Hat People.

I explain it all in the video.

More on my colonoscopy

I guess most people in my age group have done this, so I'm not revealing any secrets. The day before you don't eat any solids and you take pills that make you poo. Then around five in the afternoon you start drinking stuff that makes you poo more. When you stop pooing you fall asleep.

That's what I did Monday.

Tuesday morning I got up and drank more of the liquid that makes you poo. I actually wasn't very hungry. I pooed a lot more. When my butt was like a mountain stream Joan came over and took me to the hospital. We sat around a lot. Joan came in with me. I took off everything but my socks and they gave me a gown to wear.

Joan was there to keep me calm. It was another bonding moment for us. Hand-holding and smooching. When I was finally wheeled into the OR they put oxygen in my nose. Everybody asked me my name, my date of birth and why I was there. I guess they wanted to make sure I wasn't someone else.

Then I turned over on one side and the nurse injected something in my IV. It's not like I went to sleep, I felt great, but I remember very little. I think I saw a little on the TV monitor.

Then they wheeled me out to the recovery area. They gave me graham crackers and a ginger ale, and they were delicious. Then Joanie came in and gathered me up and took me home. They warned me not to drive a car or make any momentous decisions the rest of the day. I didn't.

The colonoscopy wasn't so bad. I just didn't like crapping for the two days before it.

Music: Skeleton Crew

On You Tube, Skeleton Crew.

 

Done

Whew. I am back at Joanie's now. I had my colonoscopy today. I spent yesterday mostly poised over the porcelain throne. Joan drove me to Kaiser to get it done. Everyone was very nice, and whatever they put in my IV got me nice and mellow. I can't say that I remember much about the procedure. They clipped out a polyp but I don't find out about it until the report comes back in a couple weeks. When they wheeled me out they gave me a ginger ale and graham crackers. Then Joanie collected me up and we went to an IHOP for breakfast.

So I'm feeling nice and relaxed now. Glad it's all over. Next I have to get an eye exam, but it hopefully won't require me cleansing my system.

Relief.

More on the super drug

Aspirin's been getting a lot of good pub lately, so I'm taking my baby aspirins.

"We're finding this old dog of aspirin already knows new tricks," said Dr. Greg Steinberg, a co-principal investigator of the study. "In the current paper we show that, in contrast to exercise or metformin which increase AMPK activity by altering the cells energy balance, the effects of salicylate is totally reliant on a single Ser108 amino acid of the beta 1 subunit.

"We show that salicylate increases fat burning and reduces liver fat in obese mice and that this does not occur in genetically modified mice lacking the beta1 subunit of AMPK," he said. Steinberg is an associate professor of medicine in the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine at McMaster University and the Canada Research Chair in Metabolism and Obesity.

These findings are important as a large clinical trial is currently underway testing whether salsalate (a well-tolerated aspirin derivative), can prevent Type 2 diabetes.

Salicylate, which is derived from willow bark, and is the active ingredient in aspirin, is believed to be one of the oldest drugs in the world with first reports of its use dating back to an Egyptian papyrus in 1543 BC.

An anti-inflammatory drug first used as a painkiller more than a century ago, aspirin is now given to people at risk of heart attacks and strokes as well as patients with vascular disease. McMaster scientists played a key role in that previous research.

Three studies published last month in the medical journal The Lancet reported that taking an aspirin every day may significantly reduce the risk of many cancers and prevent tumors from spreading. The unanswered question was how this anti-cancer benefit occurs.

Eating meat

Apparently, man conquered the earth in order to find that next steak.

Learning to hunt was a decisive step in human evolution. Hunting necessitated communication, planning and the use of tools, all of which demanded a larger brain. At the same time, adding meat to the diet made it possible to develop this larger brain.

"This has been known for a long time. However, no one has previously shown the strong connection between meat eating and the duration of breast-feeding, which is a crucial piece of the puzzle in this context. Eating meat enabled the breast-feeding periods and thereby the time between births, to be shortened. This must have had a crucial impact on human evolution," says Elia Psouni of Lund University.

She is a developmental psychologist and has, together with neurophysiologist Martin Garwicz (also in Lund) and evolutionary geneticist Axel Janke (currently in Frankfurt but previously in Lund) published her findings in the journal PLoS ONE.

Among natural fertility societies, the average duration of breast-feeding is 2 years and 4 months. This is not much in relation to the maximum lifespan of our species, around 120 years. It is even less if compared to our closest relatives: female chimpanzees suckle their young for 4-5 years, whereas the maximum lifespan for chimpanzees is only 60 years.

Read it and weep, vegetarians. As I once sang, "When a skipper nets a Flipper it's as bad as Jack the Ripper, and that's why I'd rather eat meat."