Thursday, February 12, 2015

yo-yoni: sour, tangy, and tingly on the tongue...,


motherboard.vice |  The idea first came up while a friend and I were discussing the vagina's probiotic properties. "Why is there a whole cookbook of cum-based recipes and not a SINGLE THING on Google about culturing jazz juice?" she wrote in a message to me and a few of our friends.

So, as the disapproving ghost of Julia Child looked on, she grabbed a spoon, a pan, and a candy thermometer, and set out to create yogurt from her vagina—the ultimate in locally-sourced cuisine.
Cecilia Westbrook is a friend of mine, and an MD/PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. We had joked before about making yogurt from vaginal secretions—predictable jokes about the dietary benefit of eating pussy, about naming the product ‘Queeffer’—but then a Google search was performed and: nothing. Not even in medical literature. Curiosity piqued, Westbrook began to research in earnest. What choice did she have but to try it herself?

Every vagina is home to hundreds of different types of bacteria and organisms. These organisms—collectively known as the vaginal community—produce lactic acid, hydrogen peroxide, and other substances that keep the vagina healthy. The dominant bacteria is called lactobacillus, which also happens to be what people sometimes use to culture milk, cheese, and yogurt.

But Westbrook didn’t make her yogurt just for the sake of some amazing jokes. And she certainly didn’t make it because she was hungry. She knew enough about the chemistry of the vagina to think that eating a batch of yogurt made from her ladyjuices would be good for her. Seriously.

Her first batch of yogurt tasted sour, tangy, and almost tingly on the tongue. She compared it to Indian yogurt, and ate it with some blueberries.

Saturday, February 7, 2015

disgusting deuterostem incubator of stench and contagion...,


NYTimes |  Have you ever been on the subway and seen something that you did not quite recognize, something mysteriously unidentifiable?

Well, there is a good chance scientists do not know what it is either.

Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College released a study on Thursday that mapped DNA found in New York’s subway system — a crowded, largely subterranean behemoth that carries 5.5 million riders on an average weekday, and is filled with hundreds of species of bacteria (mostly harmless), the occasional spot of bubonic plague, and a universe of enigmas. Almost half of the DNA found on the system’s surfaces did not match any known organism and just 0.2 percent matched the human genome.

“People don’t look at a subway pole and think, ‘It’s teeming with life,’ ” said Dr. Christopher E. Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medical College and the lead author of the study. “After this study, they may. But I want them to think of it the same way you’d look at a rain forest, and be almost in awe and wonder, effectively, that there are all these species present — and that you’ve been healthy all along.”

Dr. Mason said the inspiration for the study struck about four years ago when he was dropping off his daughter at day care. He watched her explore her new surroundings by happily popping objects into her mouth. As is the custom among tiny children, friendships were made on the floor, by passing back and forth toys that made their way from one mouth to the next.

“I couldn’t help thinking, ‘How much is being transferred, and on which kinds of things?’ ” Dr. Mason said. So he considered a place where adults can get a little too close to each other, the subway.
Thus was the project, called PathoMap, born. Over the past 17 months, a team mainly composed of medical students, graduate students and volunteers fanned out across the city, using nylon swabs to collect DNA, in triplicate, from surfaces that included wooden benches, stairway handrails, seats, doors, poles and turnstiles.

Thursday, February 5, 2015

eating is so passé, or, resistance is futile

The rich green color of the photosynthesizing sea slug, Elysia chlorotica, helps to camouflage it on the ocean floor. Credit: Patrick Krug


Marine Biological Laboratory | How a brilliant-green sea slug manages to live for months at a time “feeding” on sunlight, like a plant, is clarified in a recent study published in The Biological Bulletin.
The authors present the first direct evidence that the emerald green sea slug’s chromosomes have some genes that come from the algae it eats.
These genes help sustain photosynthetic processes inside the slug that provide it with all the food it needs.
Importantly, this is one of the only known examples of functional gene transfer from one multicellular species to another, which is the goal of gene therapy to correct genetically based diseases in humans.
“Is a sea slug a good [biological model] for a human therapy? Probably not. But figuring out the mechanism of this naturally occurring gene transfer could be extremely instructive for future medical applications,” says study co-author Sidney K. Pierce, an emeritus professor at University of South Florida and at University of Maryland, College Park.
The team used an advanced imaging technique to confirm that a gene from the alga V. litorea is present on the E. chlorotica slug’s chromosome. This gene makes an enzyme that is critical to the function of photosynthetic “machines” called chloroplasts, which are typically found in plants and algae.

methuselah



FASEB Journal | Telomere extension has been proposed as a means to improve cell culture and tissue engineering and to treat disease. However, telomere extension by nonviral, nonintegrating methods remains inefficient. Here we report that delivery of modified mRNA encoding TERT to human fibroblasts and myoblasts increases telomerase activity transiently (24–48 h) and rapidly extends telomeres, after which telomeres resume shortening.