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Sean Nash

Bee body mass, pathogens and local climate influence heat tolerance - 1 views

phys.org/...body-mass-pathogens-local.html

climatechange climate bees heat pathogens size mass HSR HSR-2025 science environmental questions biology potential research idea

shared by Sean Nash on 07 May 24 - No Cached
Sean Nash liked it
  • "But few studies have examined biotic impacts, such as pathogen infection, on thermal tolerance in natural populations in combination with abiotic factors," she explained.
  • examined bee physical traits—such as sex differences in body mass—to understand how these traits interact with environmental conditions, pathogens and other factors
  • They found that variation in heat tolerance was influenced by size, sex and infection status of the bees. "Small-bodied, ectothermic—or cold-blooded—insects are considered to be highly vulnerable to changing climate because their ability to maintain proper body temperature depends on external conditions,"
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • researchers hypothesized that the bees' heat tolerance would increase with body size; that male heat tolerance would increase with ambient temperatures above ground whereas female heat tolerance would increase with sandier soils; and that parasite infection would reduce heat tolerance
  • To test these hypotheses, the researchers collected squash bees from 14 sites across Pennsylvania that varied in mean temperature, precipitation and soil texture. They measured individuals' critical thermal maximum—the temperature above which an organism cannot function—as a proxy for heat tolerance
  • Although both sexes showed a positive correlation between heat tolerance and size, male squash bees had a greater change in their critical thermal maximum per unit body mass than females, suggesting that there may be another biological trait influencing the impact of body mass on heat tolerance that differs between the sexes
  • Sean Nash on 07 May 24
     
    There is a strong feasibility element to this sort of work. Being invertebrates, there would be no problem collecting large numbers of bees from the environment for testing. Now... how that is typically done in other research studies... is something to dig into. The challenge here would be the observation/measurement of parasites (like the trypanosomes mentioned here). It might be worth digging into microdissection methods and techniques that others have reported on when working with pollinators and other small insects. It might not be impossible, even in our lab, but it would definitely be a (good) challenge and perhaps something we could find an expert to help us with.
Sean Nash

Tools to illustrate your scientific works! (open source web-based) | by Dr. Veronica Es... - 0 views

medium.com/...-source-web-based-c5bd12aaec5b

GoOpen CC creativecommons HSR HSR-2025 science illustration images art illustrations modeling models diagrams free opensource

shared by Sean Nash on 01 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • 1.-ChemixChemisc is an educational app that lets you easily draw lab diagram setups and explain your experiments. It has a large library of highly customisable apparatus and various features to help you draw diagrams with ease [3].
  • 2.-SmartSince its launch in 2001, Servier Medical Art is a trusted and internationally recognized resource used in respected journals, textbooks, online resources, and more. [ In this website you will find 3000 Free medical images to illustrate your publications and Powerpoint presentations!
  • 3.-BioiconsBioicons is a free library of open source icons for scientific illustrations using vector graphics software
    • Sean Nash
      Sean Nash on 01 Jul 24
       
      This one I already knew of and used. Several students made use of this resource last year.
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  • 4.-Health IconsHealth Icons is a volunteer effort to create a ‘global good’ for health projects all over the world. These icons are available in the public domain for use in any type of project.
  • 5.-SciDrawSciDraw is a free repository of high quality drawings of animals, scientific setups, and anything that might be useful for scientific presentations and posters [9].
  • 5.-Draw.ioDraw.io is a free, online diagramming tool that allows you to create flowcharts, diagrams, mind maps, organisation charts, and much more. A web-based application, Draw.io is fully integrated with Google Drive. This means that you can automatically save the results of your work in your Google Workspace or Gmail account [10].
  • Sean Nash on 01 Jul 24
     
    Save these for later this year. You will likely use resources like this to aid in your diagrams/models for your display.
Sean Nash

Airplane Noise Exposure May Increase Risk of Chronic Disease | SPH - 0 views

www.bu.edu/...crease-risk-of-chronic-disease

HSR HSR-2025 airplane noise disease environmental science questions statistical analysis mathematics computer science potential research idea behavioralscience

shared by Sean Nash on 06 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • people who were exposed to higher levels of noise from aircraft were more likely to have a higher body mass index, an indicator for obesity that can lead to stroke or hypertension. The findings highlight how the environment—and environmental injustices—can shape health outcomes
  • self-reported body mass index (BMI)
  • The study is the first to explore a connection between aircraft noise exposure and obesity nationwide in the United States; past studies on this subject have focused on European populations, and results have varied
    • Sean Nash
      Sean Nash on 06 Jun 24
       
      It would be interesting to see how these studied varied. I would bet that there are other, stronger factors overlying this effect, and it would be challenging to tease out this signal from other socioeconomic factors, but I very much like this concept.
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  • “Prior research has shown that aircraft noise can elevate stress responses and disturb sleep, but there has been mixed evidence of any links with body mass index,” says study lead and corresponding author Matthew Bozigar, assistant professor of epidemiology at OSU and a former postdoctoral associate at SPH. “We were surprised to see a fairly robust link between aircraft noise and higher body mass index among women across the US.”
  • These new findings underscore the role of the environment on one’s risk of chronic disease.
  • Junenette Peters, associate professor of environmental health, and colleagues examined airplane noise exposure and self-reported BMI and other individual characteristics among nearly 75,000 participants living around 90 of the major US airports
  • The team examined aircraft noise levels every five years from 1995 to 2010, using a day-night estimate (DNL) that captures the average noise level over a 24-hour period and applies a 10 dB adjustment for aircraft noise occurring at night, when background noise is low.
    • Sean Nash
      Sean Nash on 06 Jun 24
       
      I'm sure there are low-powered data loggers that measure dB that we could plant in various places (varying distances from airports (or other things... even just distances from population centers in general). This would allow us to not only work with and search for correlations between data points already collected, but also to generate more specific data on our own. The human data might not necessarily have to be collected by us. The challenge might be just to find databases that have already been collected for various reasons. Much science is done in this way, where instead of generating a ton of data to analyze, the researcher used previously collected data to ask new and interesting questions of.
  • Although the team acknowledges that BMI is a suboptimal metric, the independent and strong association between more aircraft noise exposure and higher BMI that they observed is notable.
  • “We can only hypothesize about why we saw these regional variations, but one reason may relate to the era of regional development, building characteristics, and climate which may affect factors such as housing age, design, and level of insulation,” says Peters. “Regional differences in temperature and humidity may influence behaviors such as window opening, so perhaps study participants living in the West were more exposed to aircraft noise due to open windows or housing type, which allowed more noise to penetrate.”
    • Sean Nash
      Sean Nash on 06 Jun 24
       
      The really interesting work here would be teasing interesting patterns out of really complex data sets. For example, people living near airports typically live in housing that is less expensive due to the lesser desirability of living in that area. That tends to correlate with lower socio-economic status found near airports. However, this is interesting because the major flightpaths to the KCI airport do not exactly line up in this way. For example, three of the school districts in Missouri that line up with KCI runways (Park Hill Schools - where we live, Platte County Schools, Kearney Schools, Smithville Schools, and the northern part of North Kansas City Schools) are all of a higher than average socioeconomic status than outlying areas closer to the city. This is unusual in major metropolitan areas.
  • Previous data suggest that Black, Hispanic, and low-income populations are disproportionately exposed to aircraft noise. The participants in the NHS study groups were primarily White and of mid-level socioeconomic status. 
    • Sean Nash
      Sean Nash on 06 Jun 24
       
      Again, this is a bit different than around most airports. The area immediately surrounding KCI is rather white and mid-to-upper SES.
  • “We need to study the potential health impacts of environmental injustices in transportation noise exposures alongside other environmental drivers of poor health outcomes” Bozigar says. “There is a lot more to figure out, but this study adds evidence to a growing body of literature that noise negatively impacts health.”
    • Sean Nash
      Sean Nash on 06 Jun 24
       
      What other environmental factors can be studied either by direct measurement, or by querying previously-collected data to ask/answer questions about environmental health?
nataliegomes

Do Invertebrates Have Emotions? | The Scientist Magazine® - 1 views

www.the-scientist.com/ertebrates-have-emotions-70067

HSR-2025 science biology behavioralscience invertebrates HSR questions potential research idea

shared by nataliegomes on 07 May 24 - No Cached
  • He adds that he doubts that the findings are applicable to other insect species, which still might act purely on instinct.
  • Invertebrate nervous systems, physiology, and sensory experiences are dissimilar to ours, and designing experiments to measure their emotions has been challenging. 
  • If the responses weren’t purely reflexive, it would open up the possibility that the animals could feel pain. 
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • After placing acetic acid—a mild irritant—on the crabs’ antennae, they found that the crabs rubbed their antennae against the glass of their aquarium, seemingly in an attempt to take the acid off.
    • nataliegomes
      nataliegomes on 07 May 24
       
      The use of an invisible irritant rather than a notable injury shows that they can feel the pain, instead of just noticing an injury to their body.
Kylie John

Dams trigger exponential population declines of migratory fish | Science Advances - 0 views

www.science.org/...sciadv.adi6580

HSR-2025 environmental fish behavioralscience biology dam

shared by Kylie John on 13 May 24 - No Cached
  • When the GD, the first dam across the mainstream of the Yangtze River, was built in the 1970s, the Chinese government explicitly demanded that the dam consider the conservation of fish.
  • Dams can harm migratory fish by disrupting their life cycles and then causing population extinctions.
    • Kylie John
      Kylie John on 13 May 24
       
      Is it possible to give the fish a different area to migrate to and from?
  • We divide the species population into spawning stock (spawners), which are sexually mature adults participating in the current year’s breeding, and recruitment stock, which includes larvae, juveniles, and subadults that have not reached the reproductive age and sexually immature adults/post-spawners that do not participate in the current year’s breeding.
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  • The sixth misjudgment concerns the assertion that fishways are unnecessary in dams. The 1982 GD-FRP suggested that fishways were not needed for the Chinese sturgeon (14). The TGD, built in 1993, followed this idea and did not include fishways.
  • This study has certain limitations, such as the need for larger sample sizes of fish to improve the accuracy of the precision of fish life cycle models.
Sean Nash

A new breakthrough in understanding regeneration in a marine worm | ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...240702135526.htm

shared by Sean Nash on 03 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • The sea worm Platynereis dumerilii is only a few centimetres long but has a remarkable ability: in just a few days, it can regenerate entire parts of its body after an injury or amputation.
    • Sean Nash
      Sean Nash on 03 Jul 24
       
      Trevor Davids used the California blackworm, Lumbriculus variegatus, to examine the effects of titanium dioxide nanoparticles on regeneration rate. Lumbroculus is a freshwater worm and easy to care for.
  • a research team led by a CNRS scientist1 has observed that gut cells play a role in the regeneration of the intestine as well as other tissues such as muscle and epidermis
  • Even more surprising, the team found that this ability of gut cells to regenerate other tissue varies according to their location: the closer they are to the posterior end of the worm, the greater the variety of cell types they can rebuild
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • This was tracked using different markers in particular by fluorescent beads ingested by the worms.
    • Sean Nash
      Sean Nash on 03 Jul 24
       
      This is similar to what Grant Reed was trying to do with painted lady butterflies. He wanted to see the effects of ingesting plastic nanoparticles on their development and regeneration. The smart selection of fluorescent nanoparticles (which we purchased and still have) would allow the tracking of the particles using specialized microscopy.
  • Annelids, or 'segmented worms', which have only been studied in the last 20 years, are an ideal model for the study of regeneration, a process that is widespread in animals but still mysterious for scientists.
  • The research team will continue this work to determine whether cell types, other than gut cells, can play a role in regenerating a variety of cell types.
  • Journal Reference: Loïc Bideau, Zoé Velasquillo-Ramirez, Loeiza Baduel, Marianne Basso, Pascale Gilardi-Hebenstreit, Vanessa Ribes, Michel Vervoort, Eve Gazave. Variations in cell plasticity and proliferation underlie distinct modes of regeneration along the antero-posterior axis in the annelid Platynereis. Development, 2024; 151 (20) DOI: 10.1242/dev.202452
  • Sean Nash on 03 Jul 24
     
    There are elements of this study that connect to what Trevor Davids & Grant Reed were doing last year... but with a different model organism.
Kylie John

Ants perform life saving operations - the only animal other than humans known to do so ... - 0 views

www.livescience.com/...her-than-humans-known-to-do-so

HSR-2025 HSR behavioralscience insects potential research idea

shared by Kylie John on 16 Jul 24 - No Cached
Sean Nash liked it
  • In experiments, they observed that the ants treated their nest members' femur injuries by cleaning the wound with their mouths before amputating the leg by repeatedly biting it, while the tibia wounds were treated with just cleaning.
    • Kylie John
      Kylie John on 16 Jul 24
       
      I wonder how the ant functions after this. It mentions that later the survival rate goes up but is the ant still able to do everything it used to? Like how ants can carry a lot more than their body weight, does that change for the ant after it got amputated?
  • The scientists are now extending their research to other ant species that don't possess special antimicrobial glands to see if other ants have the ability to perform surgeries. 
    • Kylie John
      Kylie John on 16 Jul 24
       
      Research oppurtunity?
  • Sean Nash on 16 Jul 24
     
    This one has promise........
Kylie John

What causes you to get a 'stitch in your side'? | Live Science - 0 views

www.livescience.com/...u-to-get-a-stitch-in-your-side

HSR-2025 biology body

shared by Kylie John on 16 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • This theory is supported by the fact that side stitches become more likely if you eat or drink right before exercise.
    • Kylie John
      Kylie John on 16 Jul 24
       
      Does this mean that if I don't eat before I run I won't get a side stitch because I would appreciate that
  • Sean Nash on 16 Jul 24
     
    Yeah. I was always prone to this. It made CC even more excruciating!
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