Woodside, Nov. 08

St. Patrick Day’s Parade

March 17, 2009, New York:

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Firemen got the most hoots at the St. Patrick Day’s Parade in Manhattan.  An abundance of green and men in skirts marked the day.

Interview with Randall Munroe

I got to talk to Randall Munroe, creator of the webcomic xkcd, today.  Here’s what he said:

“The raptor thing is an honest-to-god phobia I had.  After I watched Jurassic Park, I used to have these dreams about raptors.”

He used to think that there were raptors everywhere (he was 10 or 11 years old).  He would watch the doors and windows, and imagine them in crawlspaces.  He would sit in class and look at the ceiling tile, expecting a raptor to jump down at him any moment.

“I was joking about it, but I would still check doors and windows,” he said.  It was a half-real, half-unreal belief.

Now at 24, he still has the dreams.  “I still have dinosaur dreams every six months. I’ m in some kind of building, stuck.”

It has many open windows from which a raptor can get in.  He is surrounded by jungle, primer raptor habitat.  He needs to run to another building, but that one is not really safe either.    There is no escape.

“I have had it so many times, its comforting,” said Munore.

Then he drew the comic “Velociraptors” in xkcd:

The first Velociraptor comic that stemmed from Munroe's childhood phobia

News tag

From The Hindu Magazine, 8/03/09:

Intervention from below

Something special took place in Durban last month when dockworkers, members of the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU), refused to unload a ship carrying Israeli cargo. It was an intervention from below in global politics, drive n not by national, ethnic or religious affinity but by principle, experience and common humanity.

…

Immediately and concretely, the dockworkers were responding to Israel’s three-week attack on Gaza, which left more than 1,300 Palestinians dead, including 431 children, as well as 5,300 injured, including 1,870 children and 1,600 permanently disabled. Israel’s losses were of a different order: three civilians and 10 soldiers killed, 113 soldiers and 84 civilians injured. Gaza’s infrastructure was battered. 120,000 houses were damaged and 4,000 demolished. In the course of the operation, the Israelis are said to have dropped 1.5 million tons of explosives on Gaza — one ton for each inhabitant.

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Only thing consistent is change

Interview with Barry Graham, former crack addict:

“If I’d have sat down with my grandfather–god bless his day–and told him that, ‘You know what? In the year 2009, we gonna have a black president.’

He’s gonna think, ‘Boy, you crazy? A black president?’

But you know what? I’m telling you, I know older people who told me, there’ll never be a black president. Well, look where we at at 2009.

So you know that’s the thing I always look at. Things change, anybody can change if they allow themselves to. They say, and its true, the only thing consistent is change.”

Elixir of old age

Traditional Okinawa food (courtesy Flickr)

The indigenous people of the Ryukyu Islands have, it seems, the elixir of old age.  They live on average for 110 years.

Their longevity has been tied to their eating habits, and termed the Okinawa diet by commercial interests.  The islanders consume only 1 calorie per gram of food, primarily through green and yellow vegetables, grains and very little sugar.  They stop eating when they are 80 per cent full.  Essentially, they are engaging in a nutrient-rich, low-calorie diet that triggers a stress response within their cells.

The years of low calorie consumption leads to a long, healthy life, say the proponents of the diet.  A recent article by Dr. Sandy Westerheide and colleagues in the journal Science provides support for this theory, although in organisms several orders of magnitude less complex than humans.

The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans responds similar to human cells in times of calorie restriction.  Within the millions of cells that make up the tiny nematode, there are specific pathways that act in concert to keep the organism going.

In response to stress such as reduced calorie intake, the cells adapt by changing their pathways, according to Dr. Westerheide.  They do so in tiny increments that, in the way of life, have amplified results—in this case, increased longevity.

The key players in the pathway that get changed are highly conserved proteins that are the master controllers of the microscopic world of the cell.

They are called transcription factors.  They tell the cell whether to grow, divide, fight invaders, specialize, or commit suicide.  Their functions are as ubiquitous in humans as the nematode, although small differences in sequence may exist.

Dr. Westerheide focused on two proteins, the enzyme sirtuin 1 (SIR1) that increases the production of the second protein, heat shock factor 1 (HSF1).  Both increase in concentration within cells when the body consumes fewer calories.

The ultimate result is an increase in HSF1 production.  This protein works entirely by binding to DNA, and sending signals that promote growth.

In aging individuals, there is less SIR1, and in the absence of this protein, HSF1 can no longer bind DNA.  There is no growth.  Instead, there is aging, and eventually, death.

But in an individual who meticulously controls his or her calorie consumption, a stress response is triggered.  These responses, learnt early in evolution, are protective mechanisms that allow cells to remain alive in the face of harsh conditions—thermal stress faced by single-celled bacteria on hot sulfur springs, oxygen toxicity faced by the lung cells of scuba divers, and calorie restriction faced by cells in Ryukyu islanders.

In the nematode, the stress response increases the levels of SIR1.  This leads to increased binding by HSF1 to DNA, leading to growth signals even in an aging cell.

That is the secret of the long life of the healthy nematode.  Whether HSF1 has a part in the response in higher organisms remains to be seen, but SIR1 looks important.

And given that cancer cells have strong stress responses, Dr. Westerheide’s work indicates a role for HSF1 in forming tumors, something that has been hinted at already by other researchers.

Small proteins thus have big roles in the elixir of the Ryukyu islanders.

Second mass grave found in Bangladesh

Second mass grave found, from The Hindu 1/03/09