Single cells are small. Really, REALLY small. When you read that a suspended cell is approximately 10-15 microns in diameter it all seems fine and well; you’ll write it down or take note of it, then move along. However, if you stop to think about how small 10-15 microns is, it begins to baffle your mind. I’ve tried so many times to try and picture just how small micron-scale items are that I have a hard time believing anyone can truly imagine a cellular scale.
Fortunately, the Genetic Science Learning Center at the University of Utah has developed a web visualization tool that provides a sliding scale to illustrate the spectrum of sizes from 12 point font all the way down to a single carbon atom. Along the way you’ll run into skin cells, tRNAs, even an amoeba.
Intrigued? Visit the Cell Size and Scale tool now.
X Sunney Wei and others at Harvard University recently demonstrated a new technique for stimulated emission microscopy that allows high resolution imaging of generally non-fluorescent chromophores (such as drugs). This imaging technique relies on pumped laser sources and new techniques for obtaining the fluorescent emission streams. Use of this sort of microscopy could lead to vast increases in resolution of non-fluorescent particles and assist in determining modes of research for pharmaceuticals.
New Insight About Why Chimpanzees Can’t Speak, But We Can
Why is it that humans can speak, but chimpanzees, with their >98% genetic identity to humans, can’t? For almost a decade scientists have known that the FOXP2 gene is responsible for the mendelian development of language in humans. Theories abound about how a mere 2 amino acid change may have been all that was needed to allow us to surpass the grunting and grumbling of our more ancestral relatives to being able to formulate spoken language.
New findings from US researchers have unveiled new insight into exactly how the FOXP2 gene confers differential transcription and have depicted these findings in vitro. The researchers continue and show these observations in vivo in both humans and chimpanzees as well. By doing so, the authors have provided novel relationships in the gene pathways that regulate the speech development of humans, specifically on the development of the central nervous system (CNS). This insight will hopefully be able to provide opportunities for speech and gene therapy and may prove to help us understand just a bit more about what exactly makes us human.
Read more at Nature: Human-specific transcriptional regulation of CNS development genes by FOXP2