If you, like me, want to enjoy some science with your kids and not feel pushy about it, National Geographic has a terrific program coming out this evening. My kids can't get enough of None Of The Above which debuts at 9 PM tonight.

Host Tim Shaw gets right to it and kids like that. He has the two episodes we saw moving at full-speed.

The premise is simple; Tim presents a fun or clever twist on a seemingly intuitive experiment and asks people what they think will happen. He even provides them with the answer, in the form of multiple choice responses - but watch out for those choice "D: None Of The Above" picks that give the show its name. 

Bosses who are most conscientious about the fairness of workplace decisions make their workers happier and their companies more productive, but they may be burning themselves out.

A new paper found the act of carefully monitoring the fairness of workplace decisions wears down supervisors mentally and emotionally.  The researchers surveyed 82 bosses twice a day for a few weeks. Managers who reported mental fatigue from situations involving procedural fairness were less cooperative and socially engaging with other workers the next day. 

(Millbrook, NY) People living in northern and central parts of the U.S. are more likely to contract Lyme disease and other tick-borne ailments when white-footed mice are abundant. Mice are effective at transferring disease-causing pathogens to feeding ticks. And, according to an in-press paper in the journal Ecology, these "super hosts" appear indifferent to larval tick infestations.

Drawing on 16 years of field research performed at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, the paper found that white-footed mice with hundreds of larval ticks survived just as long as those with only a few ticks. Even more surprising, male mice with large tick loads were more likely to survive during a given season.

The researchers found that p53 limits invasion by initiating a chain of events that ultimately prevents the formation of lamellipodia, cell membrane protrusions that spur cell movement and invasion. p53 activates a mitochondrial protease called Omi, which is then released into the cytosol of the cell when Ras causes mitochondria to fragment. Omi cleaves actin filaments in the cytoskeleton, and the decrease in actin suppresses the activity of p130Cas, a focal adhesion signaling protein that promotes the formation of lamellipodia. With low levels of active p130Cas, cells don't form lamellipodia and are therefore less able to invade.

I received the following comment from Bo Thide', one of the authors of the paper where Fabrizio Tamburini and collaborators explain their novel method to multiply the transmission of information via EM waves (see here). I think his points are of interest to many so I decided to elect his comment to a independent posting here.

By the way, Bo Thide' is a Swedish professor at the Uppsala department of Physics and Astronomy. For his CV see here.

Comments welcome...

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From Bo Thide':

Researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) in Boston have estimated that around one million children suffer from tuberculosis (TB) annually— twice the number previously thought to have tuberculosis and three times the number that are diagnosed every year. The researchers also estimated that around 32,000 children suffer from multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) annually. These findings are published in The Lancet on March 23, 2014.

Peak Organic Brewing Co. has announced that it has become the first brewer to receive Non-GMO Project verification for its beer.

They believe this makes their product more 'pure' than beers which contain grains that have instead been randomly mutated and hybdrized over thousands of years.

Potsdam: Rift valleys are large depressions formed by tectonic stretching forces. Volcanoes often occur in rift valleys, within the rift itself or on the rift flanks as e.g. in East Africa. The magma responsible for this volcanism is formed in the upper mantle and ponds at the boundary between crust and mantle. For many years, the question of why volcanoes develop outside the rift zone in an apparently unexpected location offset by tens of kilometers from the source of molten magma directly beneath the rift has remained unanswered.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have discovered that a substance called Vacquinol-1 makes cells from glioblastoma, the most aggressive type of brain tumour, literally explode. When mice were given the substance, which can be given in tablet form, tumour growth was reversed and survival was prolonged. The findings are published in the journal Cell.

The established treatments that are available for glioblastoma include surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. But even if this treatment is given the average survival is just 15 months. It is therefore critical to find better treatments for malignant brain tumours.

The shortage of oxygen, or hypoxia, created when rapidly multiplying kidney cancer cells outgrow their local blood supply can accelerate tumor growth by causing a nuclear protein called SPOP—which normally suppresses tumor growth—to move out of the nucleus to the cytoplasm, where it has the opposite effect, promoting rapid proliferation.

In the March 20, 2014, issue of the journal Cancer Cell, researchers from Chicago and Beijing describe the mechanisms that enable hypoxia to cause the overexpression of SPOP. They show that hypoxia also stimulates the shuttling of SPOP out of the nucleus, where it normally prevents tumor growth, to the cytoplasm, where it shuts down protective pathways that should restrict tumor growth.