I Was Skulking Around Barnes And Noble And I Found This Book In The Medicine Section (because That Just

You are a space traveler from Earth. One day you land on a seemingly advanced planet where the aliens are friendly. You decide to live there and learn their language, and with their technology it takes barely a day. However, you soon offend the wrong person by accident and become arrested. It is decided that your punishment is death, and you are brought a vial of liquid that you are told is of the deadliest kind. Terrified, you drink it only to find out it’s water. Turns out that the very substance keeping you alive is deadly to these creatures. Write what happens following this discovery.

 Isn’t it funny how on TV : 1) getting shot in the shoulder is always treated like it’s a minor flesh wound. It’s not like you’ve probably sustained serious or even permanent damage to your arm, or even gone through your lung…nope. 2) People are always dying of some vague infectious disease that’s only hinted at. I mean, it’s probably TB, but still, it’d be nice to get some closure. 3) People catching something after a walk in the rain and then dying. 4) Cardiac arrest is like, totally NBD. A couple of (really badly performed) pumps on the chest, and the victim is up and talking as if they didn’t just drop dead. Like, if you’ve really just arrested, you’ve probably got 5 broken ribs, an ET tube in your throat and you’ve just earned yourself a ticket to ITU.

The Björketorp Runestone & Curse

The Björketorp Runestone is one of many standing stones (menhir) located in Bleking, Sweden and is one of the world’s tallest runestones, measuring 13.7 feet (4.2 m) high. It is part of a stone circle with two other blank standing stones, with several other solitary stones in the surrounding regions. Most scholars date the runestone’s inscription to the 7th century AD. It’s carved with a type of runes that form an intermediate version between the Elder Futhark and the Younger Futhark. The runestone is inscribed on both sides, the shorter message appears to say “I foresee perdition” or “prediction of perdition” and the longer side’s inscription (pictured) translates as:

“I, master of the runes(?) conceal here runes of power. Incessantly (plagued by) maleficence, (doomed to) insidious death (is) he who breaks this (monument). I prophesy destruction / prophecy of destruction.”

Local lore says that the curse came true at one point. Long ago, a man wanted to move the runestone so that he could have more room to farm, so he piled wood around it to attempt to heat the stone and then crack it with water. The weather was calm with no wind at the time, but as soon as he lit the fire a sudden gust came and lit the man’s hair aflame. He dropped to the ground to put it out but his clothes caught fire and the poor man died in agony. The flame around the runestone, however, was miraculously extinguished, as if someone had smothered the fire.

(Image caption: Two Aplysia sensory neurons with synaptic contacts on the same motor neuron in culture after isolation from the nervous system of Aplysia. The motor neuron has been injected with a fluorescent molecule that blocks the activity of a specific Protein Kinase M molecule. Credit: Schacher Lab/Columbia University Medical Center)

Select Memories Can Be Erased, Leaving Others Intact

Different types of memories stored in the same neuron of the marine snail Aplysia can be selectively erased, according to a new study by researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and McGill University and published in Current Biology.

The findings suggest that it may be possible to develop drugs to delete memories that trigger anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) without affecting other important memories of past events.

During emotional or traumatic events, multiple memories can become encoded, including memories of any incidental information that is present when the event occurs. In the case of a traumatic experience, the incidental, or neutral, information can trigger anxiety attacks long after the event has occurred, say the researchers.

“The example I like to give is, if you are walking in a high-crime area and you take a shortcut through a dark alley and get mugged, and then you happen to see a mailbox nearby, you might get really nervous when you want to mail something later on,” says Samuel Schacher, PhD, a professor of neuroscience in the Department of Psychiatry at CUMC and co-author of the paper. In the example, fear of dark alleys is an associative memory that provides important information—e.g., fear of dark alleys—based on a previous experience. Fear of mailboxes, however, is an incidental, non-associative memory that is not directly related to the traumatic event.

“One focus of our current research is to develop strategies to eliminate problematic non-associative memories that may become stamped on the brain during a traumatic experience without harming associative memories, which can help people make informed decisions in the future—like not taking shortcuts through dark alleys in high-crime areas,” Dr. Schacher adds.

Brains create long-term memories, in part, by increasing the strength of connections between neurons and maintaining those connections over time. Previous research suggested that increases in synaptic strength in creating associative and non-associative memories share common properties. This suggests that selectively eliminating non-associative synaptic memories would be impossible, because for any one neuron, a single mechanism would be responsible for maintaining all forms of synaptic memories.

The new study tested that hypothesis by stimulating two sensory neurons connected to a single motor neuron of the marine snail Aplysia; one sensory neuron was stimulated to induce an associative memory and the other to induce a non-associative memory.

By measuring the strength of each connection, the researchers found that the increase in the strength of each connection produced by the different stimuli was maintained by a different form of a Protein Kinase M (PKM) molecule (PKM Apl III for associative synaptic memory and PKM Apl I for non-associative). They found that each memory could be erased – without affecting the other — by blocking one of the PKM molecules.

In addition, they found that specific synaptic memories may also be erased by blocking the function of distinct variants of other molecules that either help produce PKMs or protect them from breaking down.

The researchers say that their results could be useful in understanding human memory because vertebrates have similar versions of the Aplysia PKM proteins that participate in the formation of long-term memories. In addition, the PKM-protecting protein KIBRA is expressed in humans, and mutations of this gene produce intellectual disability.

“Memory erasure has the potential to alleviate PTSD and anxiety disorders by removing the non-associative memory that causes the maladaptive physiological response,” says Jiangyuan Hu, PhD, an associate research scientist in the Department of Psychiatry at CUMC and co-author of the paper. “By isolating the exact molecules that maintain non-associative memory, we may be able to develop drugs that can treat anxiety without affecting the patient’s normal memory of past events.”

“Our study is a ‘proof of principle’ that presents an opportunity for developing strategies and perhaps therapies to address anxiety,” said Dr. Schacher. “For example, because memories are still likely to change immediately after recollection, a therapist may help to ‘rewrite’ a non-associative memory by administering a drug that inhibits the maintenance of non-associative memory.”

Future studies in preclinical models are needed to better understand how PKMs are produced and localized at the synapse before researchers can determine which drugs may weaken non-associative memories.

is it possible to study science/medicine/research and pursue that as a career, even if you've majored in a humanity for undergrad and really have no prior work experience in the research field?

Yes and no. 

You can go to medical school with no research experience (I did) but you will have to have the basic science pre-med background. You can major in whatever you want, though. 

To pursue a scientific career you’re going to have to have some sort of STEM background and training, whether it’s technical school or bachelors/master’s level education. It’s hard to know what the requirements are without knowing more specifically what type of job you are thinking of.

Careers in scientific research are very competitive, actually. There is huge pressure to publish and there are fights for grant funds and university positions. You could work as a lab assistant in some cases with on-the-job training, but in most cases you’re going to need a pretty solid STEM background if you are going to design or run experiments. You have to have learned the basic lab techniques and the science behind your research to be able to actually do the research. 

In all these cases, even with a degree in the humanities, you can go back to school and bolster your science credentials, but going in with no experience is going to be tough.

girl crush

Carl Sagan, who would’ve been 83 today, on the power of books and why reading is essential for democracy. 

You get a penny every time you help someone. You notice nobody else has ever gotten a penny when they helped others, so you asked. But the person you asked didn’t answer, they just responded “You’ll know when you’re 30…” You’re 30 now, and your parents threw you a surprise party. All the people you ever helped were there. Your mother goes up to you, “So. You wanted to know why you got the pennies, right?”