Napping Bear. Or, Melodramatic Thespian Bear.  photos By Olav Thokle in Alaska’s Lake Clark National

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.

Why Do Some People with Cystic Fibrosis Live Much Longer Than Others? 

Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital have found that longevity among patients with cystic fibrosis (CF) may be linked to their genes.

Studying over 600 patients with CF, the scientists found five individuals who stood out due to their age–in their 50s and 60s–and relative lung function. By sequencing the genomes of those five patients, the scientists found a set of rare and never-before-discovered genetic variants, related to so-called epithelial sodium channels (ENaCs), that might help explain their longevity and stable lung function.

“Our hypothesis is that these ENaC mutations help to rehydrate the airways of CF patients, making it less likely for detrimental bacteria to take up residence in the lungs,” said Ruobing Wang, MD, a pulmonologist at Boston Children’s.

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Funding: This work was supported by the Gene Discovery Core of The Manton Center for Orphan Disease Research, Boston Children’s Hospital; Gilda and Alfred Slifka, Gail and Adam Slifka and the CFMS Fund; the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skeletal Diseases; the National Institute of Health (NIH) (U54 HD090255, P30 DK079307); the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development/National Human Genome Research Institute/NIH (U19 HD077671); the May Family Fund; Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Therapeutics, Inc. (RO1 HL090136 and U01 HL100402 RFA-HL-09-004); and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (R37HL51856).

Raise your voice in support of expanding federal funding for life-saving medical research by joining the AAMC’s advocacy community.

I was working upstairs when I hear one of our baby leopard geckos start screaming. Normally they only scream when threatened, but this particular guy screams at almost everything. Turns out there was a small fly in his cage that was bothering him.

Yes the fly was removed afterwards.

“It’s chaos. Be kind.”

(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.

Rage

Creative title, right? Probably not to be honest, it sounds like something a hipster would post, or an emotional teenage girl(not being sexist, just providing a cliché example). Nonetheless, I feel rather compelled to put that as the title, mainly because it’s something that I feel pretty often. Not necessarily the anger, but the violent aspect of rage, that nearly uncontrollable violence that builds up inside you, is something that I feel virtually every day. Goodness, I sound so whiny, but I feel like I have to express it somehow or else it’s going to eat away at my emotional health.

I recognize that violence isn’t the answer, but it’s infuriating to be unable to do anything other than think about what you would do to someone who truly deserves to suffer. Of course it sounds rather sociopathic, but there are people to truly need to get whats coming to them from time to time.

It’s hard to describe the feeling I get... it’s a mixture of frustration with anxiety, which produces helplessness and then finally creates the violent urge to hurt someone. I have never done anything under the influence of this urge except for once, which I would rather not get into as I was luckily stopped before things got too far. I learned to control the rage, but the build up of it makes it harder and harder to control. I realized that working out often helps reduce the buildup, but what happens when you don’t have time to work out and you are constantly placed under a lot of stress?  Well, you have several options; blow up, take it out on someone, or take a break.

Of course, the most socially acceptable answer is to take a break, which would usually require going out for some fresh air,  but in more extreme circumstances it could mean take a day or two off from work or school, and that SUCKS. Taking a day off will just add to your workload afterwards, since you’ll have to make up for the time you lost the last day. Conversely, what would happen if you let your rage out? Well, if you let it out on someone else, you could hurt them, both mentally and physically. And just blowing up could get you kicked out of your workplace, and maybe even sent to jail if things get physical.

So what is there to do? This is a problem that I find myself to be facing rather often, and it always feels like a lose-lose situation. Maybe by talking about it things could get better, but who really wants to hear someone bitch about their life? I personally would find that to be extremely boring, and it might not even work! The way I found to be a good reliever is just to write it out, but its taken me several days to put this all into something concise, a so what happens to those people who don’t have the time? I guess they turn to drugs? I’m not really sure to be honest.

Maybe my point got lost while I was blabbering about this whole thing, but what I meant to emphasize was that stress, rage and anger can easily build up in people, and sometimes there really is just no way to relieve it, which is extremely frustrating to me.

Goodness, I wrote way too much... Oh well, it helped me vent, which I guess was the purpose of this. If anyone ever actually reads this, I hope you’ve enjoyed my rather long rant on rage and anger, and I hope it was somehow beneficial to you, in whatever way that may be.

The best babysitter

other fav character this season tho B)