Share this post ✔️ The A&P Professor Science & Education Updates - Issue #39theapprofessor.substack.comCopy linkFacebookEmailNoteOther ✔️ The A&P Professor Science & Education Updates - Issue #39Kevin PattonJul 16, 2021Share this post ✔️ The A&P Professor Science & Education Updates - Issue #39theapprofessor.substack.comCopy linkFacebookEmailNoteOtherShareLife ScienceThe small beads of sweat your fingertips produce while you sleep could power wearable sensors that measure glucose, vitamin C, or other health indicators.That’s the promise of a new advance—a thin, flexible device that wraps around fingertips like a Band-Aid—that its creators say is the most efficient sweat-powered energy harvester yet. “The ability to harvest tiny amounts of sweat from the fingertips is really unique,” says Roozbeh Ghaffari, a biomedical engineer at Northwestern University who was not involved with the work.Researchers around the world are currently developing wearable sensors to measure anything from a runner’s acceleration to a diabetic’s glucose levels.Humans’ ability to efficiently shed heat has enabled us to range over every continent, but a wet-bulb temperature (TW) of 35°C marks our upper physiological limit, and much lower values have serious health and productivity impacts.Climate models project the first 35°C TW occurrences by the mid-21st century. However, a comprehensive evaluation of weather station data shows that some coastal subtropical locations have already reported a TW of 35°C and that extreme humid heat overall has more than doubled in frequency since 1979. Recent exceedances of 35°C in global maximum sea surface temperature provide further support for the validity of these dangerously high TW values.We find the most extreme humid heat is highly localized in both space and time and is correspondingly substantially underestimated in reanalysis products. Our findings thus underscore the serious challenge posed by humid heat that is more intense than previously reported and increasingly severe.A new study reveals a number of different factors, including smoking, age, education levels, sex, handedness, and family medical history, which can have an impact on reaction time.From the Black Death to AIDS, outbreaks can spur scientists to rethink how they study disease and protect public healthEarly-life exposure to antibiotics could impact brain development in areas associated with emotional and cognitive function, a new study reports. Researchers found penicillin exposure in infant mice altered the microbiome and gene expression in key areas of the developing brain.Novel treatment using messenger RNA sharply cuts production of mutant liver protein, although it’s too early to show patients with rare condition benefitPatients with chronic lung disease (CLD) have an increased risk for severe coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) and poor outcomes. Here, we analyze the transcriptomes of 611,398 single cells isolated from healthy and CLD lungs to identify molecular characteristics of lung cells that may account for worse COVID-19 outcomes in patients with chronic lung diseases. We observe a similar cellular distribution and relative expression of SARS-CoV-2 entry factors in control and CLD lungs. CLD AT2 cells express higher levels of genes linked directly to the efficiency of viral replication and the innate immune response. Additionally, we identify basal differences in inflammatory gene expression programs that highlight how CLD alters the inflammatory microenvironment encountered upon viral exposure to the peripheral lung. Our study indicates that CLD is accompanied by changes in cell-type-specific gene expression programs that prime the lung epithelium for and influence the innate and adaptive immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection.Teaching & LearningSpacing boosts learning by spreading lessons and retrieval opportunities out over time so learning is not crammed all at once. By returning to content every so often, students’ knowledge has had time to rest and be refreshed.Think your biology textbook has all the answers about cells? We’ve only begun to scratch the surface, researchers say.TAPP News & NotesSometimes, teaching any type of scientific discipline at the advanced level can feel like trying to tame wild animals. Luckily, Professor Kevin Patton has experience in that area. Patton, a founding faculty member of Human Anatomy and Physiology Instruction (HAPI) at the Northeast College of Health Sciences, “started out wanting to work with wild animals, which took me down the road of biology.” After getting his undergraduate degree in biology and completing his research on animal stress at the Tyson Research Center is St. Louis, Patton went to work as a zookeeper and an assistant animal trainer working with sea lions at the St. Louis Zoo. “I really enjoyed the part of it where I’m helping people discover things that are new to them and they didn’t know before,” he explained. “To get people excited about things I was interested in, that’s the part of teaching I like.” PreviousNext