first snow at glasgow :-)

This morning went out to tesco only noticed that a light fall of snow begin. I managed to take some pics outside my accomodation. Will share more pics next time:-

click the icon below to see more pics

snow

potential approach to overcome alcohol abuse?!

Recent publication in PNAS by a group of US reseachers showed the interaction between BK channels (one of the Ca and K voltage-gated ion channel, i.e. ion channel that opens and closes in response to changes in electrical potential across the cell membrane ) and ethanol treatment.

Results suggested beta-4 subunit of BK channel could controls ethanol tolerance at the molecular, cellular, and behavioral levels, and could determine individual differences in alcohol abuse and alcoholism.

Information from literature showed that alcohol abuse is the third largest cause of preventable mortality in the world. With this discovery, researchers can fill in the knowledge gap about pathophysiology of alcoholism, as well as determining potential therapeutic targets for alcohol abuse.

Undeniable alcohol abuse causes a lot of problem, for instance fatal road accidents, assaults and violence and some psychological side effects like increase anxiety and cause depression. It's good to see there is a great breakthrough in this study.

references:-
Martin et al. (2008). Identification of a BK channel auxiliary protein controlling molecular and behavioral tolerance to alcohol. PNAS. 105:17543-17548; doi:10.1073/pnas.0801068105

Women’s hands dirtier than their male counterpart?!

Once again, some interesting bioscience research to share. Personally, I think next time I should share some studies in my field, not only focus on health, human biology..haha

Oh my goodness, my first impression, when I read this article from BBC. Really unbelievable, this study also can be a topic of interest. It also prompted me to look for the formal journal published in PNAS, a study carried out by US researchers. Anyway, I can’t find it, and I believe this paper will be published in the next issue.

Basically, this study showed that women have a greater range of different types of bacteria on the palms of their hands than men, besides using powerful gene sequencing techniques, researchers found a typical hand had roughly 150 different species of bacteria living on it.

OK, every research also has its purpose and intention, the significant of this research, according to the researchers:- they hope their work will help scientists to establish a "healthy baseline" of bacteria species on the human hand. This could potentially help them to identify which
species are linked to specific diseases.

Some data obtained in this study:-

1. Detected and identified more than 4,700 different bacteria species across 102 human hands in the study.
2. Only five species were shared among all 51 participants.
3. Even the right and left palms of the same individual shared an average of only 17% of the same bacteria types.
4. On average, women had 50% more bacterial species on their hands than men

So, what caused women had “dirtier?” hand—(no gender discrimination, for knowledge sharing purposes..)

* Acidic skin in men, provide harsh environmental condition for bacteria to survive.
* Differences in sweat, oil gland or hormone production, due to different application of moisturizer, cosmetics by man and woman.

As mentioned by my lecturer last time—Dr. Haresh in medical microbiology course, hand washing still remains as an effective way to minimise the risk of disease, (by using anti-bacterial cleansers, not plain water)

More info, feel free to read this article at BBC

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7705608.stm


I will share the information from the scientific literature of this publish work. Please bear with CK…