The love potion built right in

Link
Oxytocin podcast

Transcript:

Hello everyone, thanks for tuning into 67.5 Science fm. I’m your host Calvin Li and this is 3 minute bio. Let’s get started here, today we are looking at a hormone called oxytocin. While oxytocin is often know to the science community as the “trust hormone” because it is apparently the hormone that makes humans trust others, there is actually a lot more going on with this natural magical potion. Oxytocin participates in many major events of human lives, for example, it plays a huge role in sexual reproduction, specifically during and after childbirth as it helps women get through labor by stimulating uterine contractions while increasing the trust between the mother and the child after birth, it is also able to break down social barriers as it induces feelings of optimism and of course… build trust, during sexual intercourse, oxytocin is the primary factor that gives humans the feeling of orgasms as the oxytocin levels in their brains increases tremendously. Other uses are healing, pain relief, diet aid, antidepressant, stress relief and all those good stuff. Yet most importantly, oxytocin is what makes us different. And by us I mean the human race, oxytocin makes us human, it makes us do things we called “morally or ethically correct” and care for others. Well, now let’s dive into how this amazing hormone works. As I said earlier, oxytocin plays a very important role in childbirth, in fact, both childbirth and milk ejection, which includes the stimulation of nipples and lactation, result from a positive feedback mechanism of the hormone as it enhances the original stimulus of oxytocin. As more oxytocin are released during childbirth, it intensifies and speeds up contractions thus helping the baby to go through the vagina. Oxytocin follows a simple endocrine pathway as the Stimulus binds to a sensory neuron, which causes the neuro-secretory cell in the hypothalamus to release a substance in this case the pituitary secretes oxytocin which is transferred from the blood to target effectors, the breast, which causes a response of milk release. Since oxytocin is a peptide hormone, it is water soluble because it has to go into the blood stream. Its cellular receptor is embedded inside the plasma membrane and converts an extracellular chemical signal into an intracellular response and it goes from a cytoplasmic response to a nuclear response in the nucleus. And that’s it for today’s show. Thanks for listening and have a great day.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytocin
http://io9.com/5925206/10-reasons-why-oxytocin-is-the-most-amazing-molecule-in-the-world
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytocin_receptor
https://notes.utk.edu/bio/greenberg.nsf/daff0e5940a0d14285257015006e1933/aea6b52b645de868852572200079e95f?OpenDocument
The Webb schools Biology textbook

Cell Respiration Lab :) CHECK IT OUT

https://sites.google.com/site/calvinsbiologydiscoveries/labs/lab-3-cell-respiration-lab

Forensics Quiz

Well, I fractured my tibia bone recently and now I have to submit my quiz online and here it is, not sure if I did it correctly, was trying to figure this out myself, but hopefully it works out.

Forensics Quiz Honors Biology

A twenty year old man was found supine along Thompson Creek Trail with a bullet wound. The entrance of the wound was on the left lateral side 1cm above the 3rd rib. The exit wound was 5 cm above the belly button in the umbilical region. While tracing the bullet path you notice at the entrance it travels in the frontal plane with a 45 degree downward angle. On inspection of the right side of the rib cage by x-ray you observe the 8th posterior rib fractured with fragments of bullet and then 3 plausible alternatives and how would you rule them out.

At a first look, this case makes no sense at all since the 8th posterior rib of the right side is fractured but the bullet went into the victim's body on the left lateral side 1 cm above the 3rd rib and exited 5cm above the umbilical region. So now I have to analyse the whole picture. First of all, the entrance of the bullet is very close to the heart. And second, the bullet followed a strange path travelling downward at 45 degrees and fractured the 8th bone and went out on top of the belly button.

Plausible alternatives:

1) The most probable reason of the victim's death is the bullet damaging the heart when it entered the body thus causing an excessive loss of blood, leading to the malfunction of the body and death. We would have to check whether the heart is shredded to confirm this possibility.

2) An alternative would come from the evidence that the bullet broke the 8th posterior rib bone, since that bone is so close to the liver, if the bullet fractured the bone, there is a possibility that the liver is damaged. And since the liver filters most poisons for our body, if the victim has had any sort of poisons that did not reach the liver in time and if the poison is strong enough to kill a human quickly, then this could be a possibility of the victim's death. However, this would mean a check on the liver itself along with a list of the victim's food intake in the past 24 hours.

3) Lastly, since the bullet exited in the umbilical region and that is where the small intestines are, then there is a chance that the bullet shredded these intestines and caused the stomach not being able to digest food or bleed out. To rule this out we would need a check on the small intestines in the umbilical region.

Hope I did this right, spent a while to figure this out haha

The Island

Well first I want to start off saying that the movie was absolutely amazing :)
 2 questions that I have:

1) If we assume that the science in the movie was possible, then why couldn't they simply grow the organs through the DNA print of a person instead of growing an actual "human"? (pregnancy case doesn't count :P)

2) Considering the cost that it took for those clones to be built, 5 mil for Lincoln 6 Echo, lets suppose that the cost was affordable for everyone, would the plan still be viable? (since there's going to be a lotttttttt of clones, can't hide them now can you?)

iPSC :)

This article was so interesting, especially to me since for some reason I've been thinking about not dying since I was little. In my opinions its considering this technology, it really doesn't have much of a morality issue since the ultimate goal of science and medicine is to benefit the human kind, or in this case, let us live longer. Induced pluripotent stems cells do not need eggs to revert to the embroylike state and that is simply mind blowing to me because embryos are basically evolved eggs. Also, the fact that it can convert into 220 different human cells was amazing since you can target whatever cell you want to regrow which makes things a lot easier. Because of these iPSC cells, there is a possibility for many cells that usually stop at the G1 interphase to keep reproducing thus increasing our life span.
Below shows how cells can be reprogrammed into iPSC cells:

Cancer.. "stage II" uhoh

I spent last week mostly working on my cancer project which reviews a new cure to melanoma skin cancer, and if you are interested in that you can go to my google site and check that out. Moreover, we took a Cancer Quest, unlike any other, we had to cure cancer...My beloved partner Anthony Dahi and I came up with the solution to put a virus beside the cancer cell and suck up the ATP that the cancer needs thus killing the cancer. And now we are watching this amazing movie called the Island, I was pretty shocked in the beginning to see Michael Bay directing it with Scarlet Jo in it :)

Cancer?... pfft just some cells acting weird

Cancers are diseases that are still mostly unknown to humankind and is caused by abnormal cell growth in parts of a body. Unlike normal cells, cancer cells do not have an order to grow, divide and die, in fact, they never know when to stop dividing and can clump up into a very small space while still dividing. When the cells cluster together in a tight space, then a tumor is formed.

Then, why do cancer cells keep reproducing? Simply because just like blood cells and sperm cells, cancer cells know how to create telomerase to rebuild telomeres. Telomeres are on the ends of a cell and everytime a cell goes through mitosis, the telomere is cut a little shorter, until there is no more telomere, then the cell cannot reproduce and dies.

Curing cancer?... so if we can simply take away the telomerase from cancer cells, we cure cancer? technically, yes but then blood cells and sperm cells wont reproduce either and you will die. Therefore if we can only focus killing telomere of the cancer cells, then we can cure cancer.