Linux kernel genomics, babyology, and the secret to lifting more weight without getting any stronger

1

A comparison of the Linux kernel’s system calls with the transcriptional network of E. coli shows two very different organizational structures. “Linux is middle-management heavy, whereas E. coli is workhorse heavy. … The authors conclude that the E. coli’s call graph evolved bottom-up, with system robustness being the main selective trait. In contrast, Linux evolved top-bottom, with reusability of the Workhorses being the main selective trait. Reusability and robustness are tradeoffs,” writes Iddo Friedberg.
[Byte Size Biology: Comparative functional genomics: penguin vs. bacterium]

2

“We do not know much about sleep in babies but it does not look like sleep in adults,” says one sleep researcher, about a recent study in which babies showed the ability to learn while asleep. Comatose adults can learn the same association (between a beep and a puff of air to the face) but the experiment doesn’t work on healthy adults, since they wake up. [New Scientist: Sleeping newborns are data sponges]

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When you’re at the gym, cool your hands between sets and you might be able to lift more. The hypothesis is that the cooling makes you think you’re less fatigued. However it works, that’s just weird.  [Sweat Science: Cooling your palms enables you to bench press more weight]

4

Fetal cells stay in their mother’s body for years - maybe forever. Nancy Schute at SciAm writes that “Fetal cells also appear to migrate to injury sites and have been found in patients with thyroid and liver damage, where they had morphed into organ cells … A mother’s body might actually be recruiting the fetal stem cells to aid in healing.” Wow! [Scientific American: Beyond Birth]

Reading up on immunology

I’m finally learning about immunology.

Sure, I knew what antibodies are, and that the body has different ways of fighting infection, and that antihistamines do something to your histamines, but I never really “got” immunology in a big-picture kind of way.

Like how, as a child of the ’80s, I grew up knowing who Darth Vader was and all that, but I’d never actually seen any of the Star Wars movies. One day my friends sat me down and made me watch all three. After that, I gained the great advantage of … well, I get a few more nerd jokes than I otherwise would. I guess that’s something.

When I had this problem with statistics, I signed up for a stats course. Now that I’m freelance I don’t get perks like ivy-league college courses for free, so I picked up a copy of Immunology: A Short Course.

This isn’t a review or an endorsement, because I’m only halfway into chapter one. (There are twenty chapters, and each is supposed to be a lecture’s worth of content.) I like that it claims to cover just the essentials, and it looks like it has a lot of good diagrams. As a visual learner, that’s key. It even has a legend in the front showing what colors and conventions they use in all the figures. The text, on the other hand, is almost unbearably dry. Just 19 and a half chapters to go…

For a quicker take on the subject, I’ve got two good online resources to share. One is a problem set from the University of Arizona - beneath its quizlike exterior is a series of helpful, illustrated tutorials. The other is sciencegoddess’s Blood Cell Bakery, a series of youtube videos in which cells are played by cookies. I can tell you, after an hour of reading a text in which the author can’t keep straight what kind of T cells he’s using the abbreviation T_H for, watching Joanne smash a cookie with a hammer to show how eosinophils work is refreshingly practical.