Cloning: To Be, or Not To Be? That Is The Question.

Many questions arise when the topic of cloning is brought up. Some of these may be as follows: What exactly is cloning? Are there different types of cloning? Is it ethical? How can cloning technologies be used? What risks are there in cloning?

When the media talks about cloning in the news, more often than not, they are talking about reproductive cloning.  There are many different types of cloning, however, and they do not all involve achieving a genetic twin of a person or other organism. Three different types of cloning include, but are not limited to, recombinant DNA technology or DNA cloning, reproductive cloning, and therapeutic cloning.

Recombinant DNA or DNA cloning is the transfer of a DNA fragment of interest from one organism to a self-replicating genetic element such as a bacterial plasmid. If you have no idea what that means, do not fret, for I will break it down so hopefully you will be able to understand it fully. DNA is the acronym of deoxyribonucleic acid, but that can be a challenge to say sometimes, so most people prefer to use its acronym instead. Recombinant DNA is a form of artificial DNA. To "clone a gene," a DNA fragment containing the gene of interest is isolated from chromosomal DNA using restriction enzymes and then united with a plasmid that has been cut with the same restriction enzymes.

Reproductive cloning is a technology used to generate an animal that has the same nuclear DNA as another currently or previously existing animal. “Dolly the Sheep”, the first mammal to be cloned from adult DNA, was created by reproductive cloning technology. In a process called "somatic cell nuclear transfer", scientists transfer genetic material from the nucleus of a donor adult cell to an egg whose nucleus, and thus its genetic material, has been removed. The reconstructed egg containing the DNA from a donor cell must be treated with chemicals or electric current in order to stimulate cell division. Once the cloned embryo reaches a suitable stage, it is transferred to the uterus of a female host where it continues to develop until birth.

Therapeutic cloning, also called "embryo cloning," is the production of human embryos for use in research. The goal of this process is not to create cloned human beings, but rather to harvest stem cells that can be used to study human development and to treat disease. This method started out being very controversial because the scientists would take the stem cells from the fetus of the organism that they were working with, which most of the times ended up killing the fetus. However, stem cells are important to biomedical researchers because they can be used to generate virtually any type of specialized cell in the human body. Although there are still many ethical concerns, many researchers hope that one day stem cells can be used to serve as replacement cells to treat heart disease, Alzheimer's, cancer, and other diseases.

There are many risks involved in cloning. More than 90% of cloning attempts fail to produce viable offspring in reproductive cloning. Many cloned animals have not lived long enough to generate good data about how clones age. Appearing healthy at a young age unfortunately is not a good indicator of long-term survival, and many clones have been known to die mysteriously.  Also, defects in the genetic imprint of DNA from a single donor cell may lead to some of the developmental abnormalities of cloned embryos.  Many people believe that scientists are “playing God” when they use cloning. If or when scientists begin to more fully experiment on human beings, many people will be outraged for the effects of cloning on the new clone can be anything from genetic abnormalities, birth defects, or even miscarriage at birth. The ethics of cloning will always be up for debate, but people need to know both sides of the argument and then decide for themselves what they believe is ethical or not.
                                                                                                                                                   Erika F.

The Science of Laughter!

Whether overheard on a crowded bus, punctuating the enthusiastic chatter of friends, or as the noisy guffaws on a TV laugh track, laughter is a fundamental part of everyday life. So common, indeed, that we forget how strange and important it is. Laughter is a regular series of short vowel-like syllables usually transcribed as “ha-ha,” “ho-ho” or “hee-hee.” These syllables are part of the universal human vocabulary, produced and recognized by people of all cultures.

Most people think of laughter as a simple response to comedy, or a cathartic mood-lifter. After ten years of research on this little-studied topic, some have concluded that laughter is primarily a social vocalization that binds people together. It is a hidden language that we all speak, and it is behavior programmed by our genes.

An experiment was done on 1,200 people laughing spontaneously in their natural environments; whenever the researchers heard laughter, they noted the gender of the speaker (the person talking immediately before the laughter), the audience (those listening to the speaker), whether the speaker or the audience laughed, and what the speaker said immediately before the laughter.

While most people may think that laughter comes from an audience after a joke, the researchers found that ordinary comments like, “Where have you been?” or  “It was nice meeting you, too” are far more likely to precede laughter than jokes. Only 10% to 20% of the laughter episodes that were witnessed followed anything joke-like. This suggests that the critical stimulus for laughter is another person, not a joke.

Also follow the research, they found that laughter was 30 times more frequent in social situations rather than solitary ones. However happy we may feel, laughter is a signal we send to others and it virtually disappears when we lack an audience. Laughter is also extremely difficult to control consciously. When asking a friend to laugh on command, they will more than likely declare that they can’t, for their efforts to laugh on command will be forced or futile. This suggests that we cannot deliberately activate the brain’s mechanisms for affective expression.

               

The researchers also found that while both sexes laugh a lot, females laugh more. In cross-gender conversations, females laughed 126% more than their male counterparts, meaning that women tend to do the most laughing while males tend to do the most laugh-getting. Given the differences in male and female laugh patterns, is laughter a factor in meeting, matching and mating? In 3,745 ads placed on April 28, 1996 in eight papers from the Baltimore Sun to the San Diego Union-Tribune, females were 62% more likely to mention laughter in their ads, and women were more likely to seek out a “sense of humor” while men  were more likely to offer it. The researchers observed that the laughter of the female, not the male, is the critical index of a healthy relationship.

However, gender patterns of laughter are fluid and shift subconsciously with social circumstance. For example, the workplace giggles of a young female executive will probably diminish as she ascends the corporate ladder. Someone who laughs a lot, and unconditionally, may be a good team player, but they’ll seldom be a president.

Laughter is contagious. Contagious laughter is a compelling display of Homo sapiens, a social mammal. In 1962, outbreak of contagious laughter in a girls’ boarding school in Tanzania forced the school to close for a day. This can explain the laugh tracks used by television. Canned laughter may sound artificial, but it makes TV viewers laugh as if they were part of a live theater audience. The fact that laughter is contagious raises the intriguing possibility that humans have an auditory laugh detector – a neural circuit in the brain that responds exclusively to laughter.

Observed, laughter is not randomly scattered through speech. This pattern requires that speech has priority over laughter. The occurrence of speaker laughter at the end of phrases suggests that a neurologically based process governs the placement of laughter in speech, and that different brain regions are involved in the expression of cognitively oriented speech and the more emotion-laden vocalization of laughter.

It has been shown in studies that laughter improves the mental and physical health of people. Laughter reduces catecholamines (a measure of activation and stress) and other hormonal measures of sympathetic activation. This reduction in stress and associated hormones is the mechanism through which laughter is presumed to enhance immune function.

Whether scientifically proven or not, laughter makes everyone feel better. Everyone that I know enjoys laughing. I do agree that females have a tendency to laugh more than males, as a way to attract or flirt with males, and males enjoy having females laugh at their jokes. Also, it is much more common to laugh when with a group of people, so I believe that it is a very common social skill, and we use it to communicate our feelings and socialize.

The fact that laughter does improve the mental and physical health of people is a nice bonus! Also, no one has to consciously to themselves to laugh, because it almost always happens subconsciously. Applying it do your day-to-day life, is as easy as breathing.

NASA | Earth Science Week: Water, Water Everywhere!

How Much Do You Know About H20?

Warm Water = World Wide Warning!!

The water cycle: Fresh water evaporates from the oceans, rains out over land, runs back into the seas, then repeats. Recently, a new study has found evidence that global warming has been speeding up this hydrological cycle.

Global annual precipitation is also dramatically increasing, but only half the increase is seen in river runoff, meaning that there is likely a large terrestrial storage of water−such as ground aquifers and glaciers− drying up. This would also be expected to eventually raise sea levels and generally dry temperate regions that depend on rivers to satisfy their thirsts.

Scientists have been predicting climate change would intensify the global water cycle. Computer models indicated that if this happened, there should also be “a redistribution of precipitation.” Driven by changes in atmospheric circulation patterns, rains and snowfall would increasingly ignore temperate regions in favor of zones nearer to the poles and tropics. Another feature of an intensifying water cycle: Storm intensity would increase. Along with the climate warming, long-frozen store of water (glaciers and permafrost) could be gushing into the seas from regions largely out of humanity’s view.  One of the easiest ways to gauge ice and permafrost melting would be to  tally stream flows around the world. Except that stream monitoring programs (never ubiquitous) have been diminishing in recent decades. Therefore a large share of the water flowing over land escapes any accounting.

Scientists have to “get creative” and figure out a new approach to figuring out stream flows across the world. To do this, they mined satellite data on sea level values (a gauge of the source of water) and data on sea-surface and cloud temperatures. These temperatures provided a gauge of ocean evaporation and eventual rainout. After their studies, the scientists found that the driver of this intensifying cycle, evaporation from the oceans, appears to be increasing by some 768 cubic kilometers per year.

With the water cycle accelerating, we could see much more violent storms, and many temperate areas (where most people now live) could become very dry. The scientists that conducted this experiment believe that it is global warming that caused this change in the water cycle, and if they are correct, then we, as the occupants of the world, need to do our best to fight global warming because that will eventually help slow down the water cycle to its natural speed.

However, we do have other options. If this increasingly faster water cycle will eventually “dry up the temperate areas of the world” then we, the informed civilians of the world who now know about this, can move to coastal areas where the land will still be fertile!

                                                                                                                                              Erika F.  

Welcome!

Welcome everyone to Erika's Bio briefing! This is my first blog that I have done, and it's for my biology class in school.  I will be posting some science abstracts, articles, pictures and maybe even some cool science videos! So feel free to leave any comments (appropriate of course, this IS for school!) or follow me! 8)