There are several ways to stay warm on a cold day. If you are human, you can turn up the heat in your home, put on a sweater, snuggle, and even produce body heat through shivering as well as non-shivering metabolic pathways – although the ability to produce heat metabolically typically declines with aging. If you are a small mammal, turning up the heat or putting on a sweater are […]
Several posters at EB 2022 in Philadelphia this month were focused on understanding the remarkable physiology of diving seals. Although we may think of the image below when we picture seals, they really are quite the athletes in water. Kaitlin Allen (a graduate student working in the laboratory of Dr. José Pablo Vázquez-Medina at the University of California Berkeley) presented her research on Northern elephant seals and how these animals […]
I learned a lot about how animals adapt to changing environmental oxygen levels in the Experimental Biology symposium on “Functional Integration across the Oxygen Cascade in the Face of Challenging Environments.” Here is what I learned… The first presenter, Dr. Lara do Amaral-Silva (postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro working with Dr. Joseph (Joe) Santin), spoke about her research on adaptations in the bullfrog “super-brain” that […]
Today we have a guest blog written by Elizabeth Evans (pictured above), a graduate student at the University of Dayton working in the laboratory of Dr. Carissa Krane. She presented her research on freeze tolerance today at the 2022 Experimental Biology conference in Philadelphia. She wrote the award-winning blog entry below which earned the 2022 Dr. Dolittle Travel Award to attend the conference. Congratulations Elizabeth!! Stranger than science fiction: treefrogs […]
Each year, the Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology section of the American Physiological Society presents their highest award, the August Krogh Distinguished Lecture, to a comparative physiologist who “has made major and meritorious contributions” to the field. Dr. August Krogh (1874-1949) was a physiologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1920. He was very interested in zoology and joined the University of Copenhagen as an Associate Professor […]
I don’t know about you, but when I see an article claiming to be able to explain “The Biology of Beauty Sleep”, I simply have to read it. Clicking on the title brought me to a news article from the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution that featured a recent study examining the idea of how sleep impacts aging. The burning question of course is whether or not there is any […]
Hibernating mammals are amazing! How in the world do they prevent blood clots when they not only reduce their body temperature but also their blood flow during hibernation? That question is precisely what a new study published in Physiological Genomics examined. Typically, cold temperatures are known to activate the process of blood clotting by stimulating platelets. Platelets are sticky cells without a nucleus that circulate in the blood. When […]
With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, heart-themed items seem to be everywhere. It is no surprise that I started thinking more and more about how humans are unique from other animals when it comes to heart disease. In my last entry, we talked about a few genetic variants that protect some humans from heart disease as well as the observation that many carnivores do not develop atherosclerosis, even when […]
Researchers have identified variants in the B4GALT1 gene of Amish people that are associated with low levels of LDL (i.e. “bad”) cholesterol and fibrinogen, a gene involved in blood clotting. In fact, people with variants in this gene are 35% less likely to be diagnosed with heart disease. When the variant was expressed in mice, the animals had similar decreases in LDL cholesterol and fibrinogen. Researchers are hoping to create […]
Red tides happen when dinoflagellate algae populations increase and turn the water a shade of red due their red pigments. These algae consume oxygen in the water and release carbon dioxide and other acidic products that make the surrounding water acidic and hypoxic. These events are becoming more common with climate change. In fact, the most recent event off the coast of Sothern California occurred in 2020 and resulted in […]
Life Lines by Dr. Dolittle 