Sci-Ed Update 337

Learnings secrets unveiled, skin secrets, nucleolus size and aging, and fart science!

Jan 04, 2025

This article is part of a special issue investigating key questions about skincare. Find the full series here.
Look under the microscope at any square centimetre of human skin and you will find it teeming with bacteria, fungi, mites and viruses. It might sound yucky, but your skin’s microbiome is an important defence against invading pathogens.
“Because there are all these bacteria already there, it’s quite hard for a pathogen to get a foothold,” says Catherine O’Neill, a dermatologist at the University of Manchester, UK, and chief science officer of AxisBiotix, a company that offers skincare products based on microbiome research. “Bacteria can also wage warfare on each other by secreting different chemicals that inhibit the growth of pathogens.”

Skin may play a hidden role in Ebola infection

**English:** Ebola virus virion. Created by GC microbiologist Cynthia Goldsmith, this colorized transmission electron micrograph (TEM) revealed some of the ultrastructural morphology displayed by an Ebola virus virion. **Source:**Public Health Image Library, #10816. Public domain.

Ebola, a severe hemorrhagic disease caused by a virus endemic in parts of East-Central and West Africa, is generally known to spread through contact with bodily fluids from individuals who have the infection.
More recent outbreaks, such as the 2013-2016 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, have shown that infectious Ebola virus (EBOV) is also found on the surface of the skin of those who have succumbed to infection or at late times during infection.
Although this suggests that the virus can be transmitted from skin contact with someone in the later stages of the disease, researchers have not yet fully understood how the virus exits the body and appears on the skin’s surface.
In a recent study, scientists at University of Iowa Health Care, working with colleagues at Texas Biomedical Research Institute and Boston University, have uncovered a cellular route that EBOV uses to traverse the inner and outer layers of skin and emerge onto the surface.
The researchers identified new cell types within the skin that are targeted by EBOV during infection and confirms that human skin tissues actively sustain EBOV infection.

Kevin Patton comment→ When students question whether there’s any new to discover about human anatomy and physiology and why any new discoveries might have practical importance, there are stories like this one.

Why do some people’s hair and nails grow quicker than mine?

Throughout recorded history, our hair and nails played an important role in signifying who we are and our social status. You could say, they separate the caveman from businessman.
It was no surprise then that many of us found a new level of appreciation for our hairdressers and nail artists during the COVID lockdowns. Even Taylor Swift reported she cut her own hair during lockdown.
So, what would happen if all this hair and nail grooming got too much for us and we decided to give it all up. Would our hair and nails just keep on growing?
The answer is yes. The hair on our head grows, on average, 1 centimeter per month, while our fingernails grow an average of just over 3 millimetres.

The Secret Algorithm Behind Learning

The famous Nobel winning physicist Richard Feynman understood the difference between “knowing something” and “knowing the name of something” and it’s one of the most important reasons for his success.
Feynman stumbled upon a formula for learning that ensured he understood something better than everyone else.
It’s called the Feynman Technique and it will help you learn anything deeper, and faster. The topic, subject, or concept you want to learn doesn’t matter. Pick anything. The Feynman Technique works for everything. Best of all, it’s incredibly simple to implement.
The catch: It’s ridiculously humbling.
Not only is this a wonderful method of learning but it’s also a window into a different way of thinking. Let me explain.
There are four steps to the Feynman Technique.

Kevin Patton comment→ Read the full article to see the four steps. Hint: They resonate strongly with themes from The A&P Professor podcast.

Winter Short: Storytelling, Featuring the Actin-Myosin Love Story

Host Kevin Patton revisits some classic segments from past episodes. In the first segment, he explains why he thinks storytelling is the heart of effective teaching. Then. he tells a brief version of his actin-myosin love story—a playful analogy to help students learn about muscle contraction.

00:00 | Introduction
01:07 | Storytelling: The Heart of Teaching
17:10 | Actin-Myosin Love Story
27:58 | Staying Connected

To listen to this episode, click on the play button above ⏵ (if present) or this vlink→ theAPprofessor.org/podcast-episode-130.html

Groundbreaking Discovery Illuminates the Brain’s ‘Memory Wars’

In the experiment, flies were trained to associate a particular smell with an electric shock using both classical and operant conditioning methods. Under classical conditioning, the flies froze in response to the smell, while under operant conditioning, they learned to flee. However, when both conditioning methods were applied simultaneously, the flies exhibited neither behavior. Instead, they appeared confused, unable to learn either response effectively.
“You can think of the brain as engaging in a mental tug-of-war,” said Prof. Parnas. “When one learning system is active, it actively suppresses the other. This prioritization prevents conflicting responses but also means the brain cannot learn two contradictory behaviors at the same time.”
The researchers identified neural mechanisms responsible for this prioritization, focusing on the brain’s ‘navigation center,’ which acts as a gatekeeper, ensuring only one type of memory takes precedence

The scientists on a mission to catch farts for the good of our health

“The things that you do in the name of science.” Malcolm Hebblewhite recalls the day he found himself and three colleagues in a darkened lab, stripped to the waist, slathered with ultrasound gel and crowded around a monitor as if they were in a birthing suite. They weren’t admiring developing fetuses, though – they were searching for experimental capsules that they had fitted with sensors to sniff out intestinal gases. Each of them had swallowed one of these and was now excitedly watching it wend its way through their gut.
It’s the kind of work that requires an intrepid spirit – and a keen sense of humour. “A bunch of engineers, developing a product to effectively measure farts. It’s just the gift that keeps on giving, right?” says Hebblewhite. “I mean, the material is endless.”
But there is a serious side to the work being done at Atmo Biosciences, a medical device company based in Melbourne, Australia. Once dismissed as noxious, antisocial waste, it is now clear that intestinal gases are a vital part of our physiology. A window into the health of our guts, they help govern our gut microbiome, influence our gut function and perhaps even that of other organs too. Knowing more about them could transform our understanding of gut health and debilitating conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and inflammatory bowel disease.
“I think the revolution is going to come when we can measure these gases well, throughout the gut,” says Peter Gibson at Monash University, Australia.

Cellular "mortality timer" discovered that dictates aging

In the course of a lifespan, organisms ranging from yeast to humans undergo an expansion in the size of their nucleoli.
One fascinating observation is that anti-aging strategies, such as consuming fewer calories, result in the presence of smaller nucleoli in cells.
This begs the question – could keeping the nucleolus small be the key to delaying aging?
Dr. J. Ignacio Gutierrez and Dr. Jessica Tyler, the study’s lead investigators, suggested that deliberately keeping nucleoli small might help slow down aging.
The experts tested this idea by engineering a method to attach the rDNA to the membrane of yeast cell nuclei. This innovative system gave them the ability to control the size of the nucleolus.
The result? Keeping the nucleolus compact appeared to delay aging to a similar extent as the calorie restriction strategy.
This discovery hints at the possibility that the nucleolus could indeed play a significant role in manipulating the aging process.

How Do You Formulate (Important) Hypotheses?

Building on the ideas in Chap. 1, we describe formulating, testing, and revising hypotheses as a continuing cycle of clarifying what you want to study, making predictions about what you might find together with developing your reasons for these predictions, imagining tests of these predictions, revising your predictions and rationales, and so on. Many resources feed this process, including reading what others have found about similar phenomena, talking with colleagues, conducting pilot studies, and writing drafts as you revise your thinking.
Although you might think you cannot predict what you will find, it is always possible—with enough reading and conversations and pilot studies—to make some good guesses. And, once you guess what you will find and write out the reasons for these guesses you are on your way to scientific inquiry.
As you refine your hypotheses, you can assess their research importance by asking how connected they are to problems your research community really wants to solve.

Kevin Patton comment→ This is a chapter from Doing Research: A New Researcher’s Guide, a free downloadable book.

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