Biochemical pathway links nail growth to fingertip regeneration

June 13, 2013

We don’t really know why some of our cells keep regenerating and some don’t. Our bodies contain all the information necessary for the growth – or regrowth – or replacement of cells but we do not know – yet – how to trigger or stop such growth. Triggering growth of cells as needed would help us we age and being able to tell cells when to stop multiplying would get rid of our cancers.

We could say that this is a failing of control. All the information necessary is available in us. All the materials necessary are available and all the tools needed are available. But our brains are not capable of giving the specific instructions to grow or to stop to our various cells. If I could I would like to give my knees the signal to regrow some cartilage but I can’t.

This research from the NYU Langone Medical Center is another little step in understanding how regeneration might work.

Wnt activation in nail epithelium couples nail growth to digit regeneration, Makoto Takeo et al, Nature (2013), Published online 12 June 2013, doi:10.1038/nature12214

NYU Press Release: Mammals possess the remarkable ability to regenerate a lost fingertip, including the nail, nerves and even bone. In humans, an amputated fingertip can sprout back in as little as two months, a phenomenon that has remained poorly understood until now. In a paper published today in the journal Nature, researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center shed light on this rare regenerative power in mammals, using genetically engineered mice to document for the first time the biochemical chain of events that unfolds in the wake of a fingertip amputation. The findings hold promise for amputees who may one day be able to benefit from therapies that help the body regenerate lost limbs.  

“Everyone knows that fingernails keep growing, but no one really knows why,” says lead author Mayumi Ito, PhD, assistant professor of dermatology in the Ronald O. Perelman Department of Dermatology at NYU School of Medicine. Nor is much understood about the link between nail growth and the regenerative ability of the bone and tissue beneath the nail. Now, Dr. Ito and team have discovered an important clue in this process: a population of self-renewing stem cells in the nail matrix, a part of the nail bed rich in nerve endings and blood vessels that stimulate nail growth. Moreover, the scientists have found that these stem cells depend upon a family of proteins known as the “Wnt signaling network”—the same proteins that play a crucial role in hair and tissue regeneration—to regenerate bone in the fingertip.
 
“When we blocked the Wnt-signaling pathway in mice with amputated fingertips, the nail and bone did not grow back as they normally would,” says Dr. Ito. Even more intriguing, the researchers found that they could manipulate the Wnt pathway to stimulate regeneration in bone and tissue just beyond the fingertip. “Amputations of this magnitude ordinarily do not grow back,” says Dr. Ito. These findings suggest that Wnt signaling is essential for fingertip regeneration, and point the way to therapies that could help people regenerate lost limbs. An estimated 1.7 million people in the U.S. live with amputations.
 
The team’s next step is to zoom in on the molecular mechanisms that control how the Wnt signaling pathway interacts with the nail stem cells to influence bone and nail growth.

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A mindless pursuit of “equality” does not excuse stupidity

June 12, 2013

Political correctness is not always rational.

“Discernment” is considered a good thing but “discrimination” is not.

“Equal pay for equal performance” sounds good but it is often illegal to pay an incompetent union member less than a competent one. Discerning a good worker can be considered discrimination.

And now it is apparently wrong to avoid the employment of criminals because it could be “discrimination”.

Washington Post: 

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Tuesday accused two major companies of indirectly discriminating against African Americans by using criminal background checks to screen out workers.

The commission said BMW effectively fired 70 black employees with criminal histories from a facility in South Carolina, even though many had been there for years. One woman with 14 years under her belt was let go after a misdemeanor conviction surfaced that was more than 20 years old and carried a $137 fine, according to the EEOC’s lawsuit. 

The agency also alleged that retailer Dollar General revoked job offers to two black women after conducting criminal background checks. In one case, the EEOC said that the records were inaccurate but that Dollar General declined to reconsider the woman’s application. The other involved a six-year-old drug conviction. …

…… The EEOC is not alone in focusing on the role of criminal background checks in black employment. Since the recession, seven states — including Maryland — have adopted laws that prohibit employers from including questions about criminal history on job applications. ……

Stupid is as stupid does.

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Thank goodness for the Russians

June 12, 2013

It isn’t often that the Russian position is to be admired and even in this case they are doing – in my opinion – the right thing but for the wrong reasons. Anything which blocks the ridiculous UN Panel on Climate Change and its pointless and wasteful exercise in Bonn is welcome. Of course the Russians are only really concerned about the value of the Carbon credits they have stock-piled. Credits they received  for shutting down inefficient industries as being environmental “good guys” but where these were going to be shut down anyway.

This from AFP:

A key panel at UN climate talks in Bonn went into deep freeze on Tuesday as Russia ignored pleas to end a procedural protest, according to a webcast of the meeting and sources there. Supported by Belarus and Ukraine, Russia refused to let work start in the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI), an important technical committee in the climate talks, more than a week after the 12-day negotiations began.

Observers said if the three countries did not back down, the future of the entire UN process to fight greenhouse-gas emissions would be at risk. “It’s a most unfortunate situation,” said Christiana Figueres, head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), as delegates admitted the panel will most likely have achieved nothing by Friday’s close.

The Russians are incensed by what happened at the UNFCCC’s last big annual meeting, held in Doha, Qatar, last December. They complain they were ignored by the conference’s Qatari chairman, who gavelled through a deal that extended the Kyoto Protocol.

The decision at Doha hamstrung Moscow’s planned sale of 5.8 billion tonnes of carbon credits that Russia had amassed under the first round of the Kyoto Protocol.

It had gained these credits not through emissions reductions efforts, but after market pressure forced the closure of CO2-spewing factories following the fall of the Soviet Union.

……..

“If these three countries maintain their positions until 2015, they could wreck the entire process,” one observer warned AFP.

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Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Politics | 1 Comment »

Parliamentary pigs and taxpayer troughs

June 11, 2013

Apparently pigs and humans share many genetic characteristics:

Researchers, who undertook the largest ever study of the pig genome, found that swine are adaptable, easy to seduce with food and susceptible to domestication – much like humans. 

Insights into the genetic code of pigs reveal the swine and its cousin the wild boar have much in common with humans.

from bellscorners.wordpress.com

This affinity between human and pig behaviour is demonstrated daily – and especially – by parliamentarians the world over. They don’t just feed – they gorge themselves. Perhaps it is the availability of the trough of taxpayers money which triggers our parliamentarians to revert to ancient type. Following the recent revelations about UK parliamentarians and their greed (Trougher Yeo), or in the US for example, comes this story from Australia:

The New South Wales Finance Minister Greg Pearce is facing further accusations about his parliamentary travel, with a Sydney newspaper reporting that he spent thousands of dollars on flights that coincided with sports events.

Last week, Premier Barry O’Farrell initiated an inquiry into claims the minister may have breached travel guidelines by taking a trip to Canberra that was initially booked through his office but was subsequently repaid by the minister.

The move came just days after he was accused of being drunk in parliament, prompting a public warning from the Premier.

Now the Daily Telegraph newspaper is reporting Mr Pearce has made at least $9,000 worth of trips to major sporting events around the country.

It says the events include the Melbourne Cup, AFL Grand Final and Australian Open, although Mr Pearce has denied the newspaper’s suggestions that he travelled to a V8 event on the Gold Coast last year.

I suppose they could all employ the defence that it is all in their genes and it is the fault of the taxpayers in providing them with the temptations which trigger their piggy instincts.

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Posted in Australia, Behaviour, Corruption, Politics | 4 Comments »

“Lull in warming even as greenhouse gases have accumulated at a record pace”

June 11, 2013

It’s old news but it is heretical and fundamentally undermines the fanciful notion that man-made carbon dioxide emissions cause global warming. Plain denial of reality is no longer credible though the most orthodox of the warmists continue to maintain their beliefs. The real scientists just get back to work and try to understand what the models have missed and try to improve the models. The New York Times which has been one of the most ardent adherents to the orthodox line can no longer ignore reality.

The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that. And that lull in warming has occurred even as greenhouse gases have accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace. …

… in a climate system still dominated by natural variability, there is every reason to think the warming will proceed in fits and starts.

Of course the NYT cannot admit it was wrong or that the heretics were right. Instead it commends the “practitioners of climate science” for being “puzzled”. It will take much more before the NYT will reveal that many of these “practitioners” are little more than “charlatans of climate science”

But given how much is riding on the scientific forecast, the practitioners of climate science would like to understand exactly what is going on. They admit that they do not, even though some potential mechanisms of the slowdown have been suggested. The situation highlights important gaps in our knowledge of the climate system, some of which cannot be closed until we get better measurements from high in space and from deep in the ocean.

And then they make their most fundamental error when they write:

We certainly cannot conclude, as some people want to, that carbon dioxide is not actually a greenhouse gas. More than a century of research thoroughly disproves that claim.

But that is a fallacy. There is no direct evidence that carbon dioxide causes global warming. That is a conclusion reached because there was “no better explanation” given the assumption that man was causing global warming. This assumption came first as some kind of religious tenet and the rest has followed.

In fact the carbon cycle itself  is not very well understood as some would claim. We do not actually know how much is absorbed by the oceans. The number – and it is a very large number – used for that comes from equating carbon dioxide production and absorption in some assumed pre-industrial equilibrium which itself has never existed.

Instead of coming to the the most parsimonious explanation which is that the effect of carbon dioxide itself – let alone man-made carbon dioxide – on climate has been grossly exaggerated, the NYT repeats some of the most convoluted fantasies regarding the “lost heat”.

So the real question is where all that heat is going, if not to warm the surface. And a prime suspect is the deep ocean. Our measurements there are not good enough to confirm it absolutely, but a growing body of research suggests this may be an important part of the answer.

Exactly why the ocean would have started to draw down extra heat in recent years is a mystery, and one we badly need to understand. But the main ideas have to do with possible shifts in winds and currents that are causing surface heat to be pulled down faster than before.

The deep-ocean theory is one of a half-dozen explanations that have been proffered for the warming plateau. Perhaps the answer will turn out to be some mix of all of them. And in any event, computer forecasts of climate change suggest that pauses in warming lasting a couple of decades should not surprise us.

Perhaps the NYT would at least concede that the “science” is very far from being settled.

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Murray Salby on carbon dioxide and temperature

June 11, 2013

Prof. Murray Salby’s presentation on 18th April 2013 in Hamburg explaining why carbon dioxide has little to do in causing global warming and in fact lags temperature both in the short term and in the long term.

 from NoTricksZone.

Models versus reality.

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Posted in Alarmism, Climate | 3 Comments »

Indian monsoon on schedule

June 10, 2013

The Indian monsoon season has just started and officially runs from June to September. It seems to be on schedule and perhaps a little early in the west and a few days late in the east. Mumbai is seeing heavy rains a few days early.  Last year the monsoon was somewhat delayed and not too regular though it was “average” taken over the entire 4 months. With industrial growth still somewhat in the doldrums a boost to agricultural output will be very welcome.

( from IMD).

Monsoon progress 10th June 2013

Monsoon progress 10th June 2013

There are no signs of the catastrophe scenarios that climate models take delight in forecasting about the effects of global warming on the Indian monsoon.

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Climate Models and Pepsodent

June 10, 2013

You’ll wonder where the warming went

when you brush your models with excrement

                                                                                                                                         with apologies to Pepsodent

Climate models just aren’t good enough – yet.

As real observations increasingly diverge from model results, the global warming establishment is reacting in 2 ways:

  1. Denial by the Warmist orthodoxy who prefer model results to real data , and
  2. Real scientists who have begun to questions the assumptions on which these models are based.

Two articles have recently been published in the mainstream scientific literature which question climate models.

1. What Are Climate Models Missing?, Bjorn Stevens and Sandrine Bony, Science, 31 May 2013, Vol. 340 no. 6136 pp. 1053-1054 , DOI: 10.1126/science.1237554

Abstract: Fifty years ago, Joseph Smagorinsky published a landmark paper (1) describing numerical experiments using the primitive equations (a set of fluid equations that describe global atmospheric flows). In so doing, he introduced what later became known as a General Circulation Model (GCM). GCMs have come to provide a compelling framework for coupling the atmospheric circulation to a great variety of processes. Although early GCMs could only consider a small subset of these processes, it was widely appreciated that a more comprehensive treatment was necessary to adequately represent the drivers of the circulation. But how comprehensive this treatment must be was unclear and, as Smagorinsky realized (2), could only be determined through numerical experimentation. These types of experiments have since shown that an adequate description of basic processes like cloud formation, moist convection, and mixing is what climate models miss most.

2. Emerging selection bias in large-scale climate change simulations, Kyle L. Swanson, Geophysical Research Letters, online 16th May 2013, DOI: 10.1002/grl.50562

Abstract: Climate change simulations are the output of enormously complicated models containing resolved and parameterized physical processes ranging in scale from microns to the size of the Earth itself. Given this complexity, the application of subjective criteria in model development is inevitable. Here we show one danger of the use of such criteria in the construction of these simulations, namely the apparent emergence of a selection bias between generations of these simulations. Earlier generation ensembles of model simulations are shown to possess sufficient diversity to capture recent observed shifts in both the mean surface air temperature as well as the frequency of extreme monthly mean temperature events due to climate warming. However, current generation ensembles of model simulations are statistically inconsistent with these observed shifts, despite a marked reduction in the spread among ensemble members that by itself suggests convergence towards some common solution. This convergence indicates the possibility of a selection bias based upon warming rate. It is hypothesized that this bias is driven by the desire to more accurately capture the observed recent acceleration of warming in the Arctic and corresponding decline in Arctic sea ice. However, this convergence is difficult to justify given the significant and widening discrepancy between the modeled and observed warming rates outside of the Arctic.

                                                                                                                                 

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Pots and Kettles or Yeo-ing the Gummer

June 9, 2013

The Gummer has been Yeo-d. I have to conclude that Tim Yeo is the pot and Gummer is the kettle. Now if “Lord Deben”  – aka John Selwyn Gummer – fights back it could become a case of Gumming the Yeo.

Two articles today which need to be juxtaposed. This is perhaps mostly of domestic interest in the UK but I am always interested when Parliamentarians live down to my expectations. Of more general interest could be the manner in which “green” subsidies have been sucked out by the owners and developers of  wind and solar projects with the aid of venal politicians who have willingly helped to make the “rules”.

Was there ever a time when politicians died of shame?

Daily Mail: 

  • Tim Yeo has complained about Lord Deben’s undisclosed green interests
  • Mr Yeo has been paid more than £400,000 by three green companies
  • Lord Deben is chairman of firm which connects windfarms to National Grid

Tim Yeo, chairman of the Energy and Climate Change select committee, has protested about Lord Deben remaining chairman of Veolia Water UK while also chairing the Committee on Climate Change, an independent body that advises the Government on the impact of climate change.

Mr Yeo’s critics will argue his protest smacks of hypocrisy as he has been paid more than £400,000 by three green companies since 2009.

Lord Deben, John Selwyn Gummer – who as Agriculture Minister in 1990 tried to persuade his daughter Cordelia to eat a hamburger during the BSE crisis – was required to undergo a ‘confirmation hearing’ before Yeo’s committee last September after being appointed chair of the Climate Change Committee. ….. 

and

The Telegraph: 

Tim Yeo, the chairman of the Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee, also said he had coached John Smith, managing director of GB Railfreight, before the executive gave evidence to the committee last month. Yeo is a paid director and shareholder of Eurotunnel — the firm’s parent company.

Mr Yeo was filmed by undercover reporters working for The Sunday Times saying: “I told him [Mr Smith] in advance what to say. Ha-ha.”

When asked if he would be interested in a £7,000-a-day consultancy contract with a solar company, the MP said: “If you want to meet the right people, I can facilitate all those introductions and I use the knowledge I get from what is quite an active network of connections.”

The reporters queried if this included Government figures. Mr Yeo replied “Yes”.

The House of Commons’ code of conduct forbids MPs from acting as paid advocates, including by lobbying ministers. ….. 

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Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Corruption, Ethics, UK | 1 Comment »

The youth of the world in 2100

June 8, 2013

In China the youth (age 15 – 24) population is already declining. In India it will keep increasing till about 2050 and then decline. In Africa it will be growing until about 2100. Most of the youth of today will not be around in 2100 but the youth of that time who will see the world through to 2200 will be 500 million each in Africa and Asia and less than 300 million in the rest of the world – subject of course to any geographical population shifts that might take place. In the period till 2100 such migrations will probably not be so significant.

From the UN’s World Population Prospects (2012 Revision):

Population age 15-24

youth of the world 2100

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