Puffin mania

May 7, 2008 / / Leave a comment

Today I’m going to post a few of our puffin photos. These birds are extraordinary creatures, rather clumsy walkers, too (see the rather out-of-focus but amusing photo on the left), very entertaining to watch.

We spent more than two hours on Inner Farne Island, off the coast of Northumberland (Seahouses), where we saw a huge number of puffins and also the burrows that they had dug using their beaks and feet, like the one on the right.

Puffin burrows are about as long as a human arm, I learned from a BBC morning program (mentioned in a blog comment by Paul) showing a Farne Island warden shoving his arm down a burrow and bringing up a rather ruffled puffin. Not a pleasant or easy thing to do, he remarked, because puffins aren’t as harmless as they look but will bite and scratch and struggle like mad. Well, I think I’d do much the same if I were being grabbed suddenly from above!

By the way, puffins are hygienically-minded creatures: they have a separate toilet area for their chicks inside the burrow. How about that? Well, okay, there is a good reason for the separate powder room: if the chick got itself all covered in…well, in you-know-what!…it might damage the waterproofing properties of its feathers. Since puffins spend most of their time out on the Atlantic ocean, you can see that that would be a huge problem!

I should mention that there are three puffin species. The one depicted in this post is the Atlantic puffin. Atlantic puffins aren’t very large, about 30-34 cm long and 18 cm high. They weigh about 500 grams, and their wingspan measures about 50-60 cm. That means that when they fly you can’t see their wings at all, they are flapping so fast.

It is impossible to describe adequately how peculiar this looks. Puffins in flight look like zooming black and white footballs with some orange-coloured chewing gum stuck on one end. I read that these amazing sea birds flap their wings up to 400 beats per minute. Their wings are powerful but made more for swimming than flying.

And they go sooo fast! Taking a photo of a flying puffin is like trying to take a photo of a flying bullet. I have dozens of photos of tiny blurry dots in the sky (or just of the empty sky, sigh). Stefano, whose camera is much more sophisticated than mine, was able to take quite a few good ones, though, like the one on the right. Of course, you can actually see the wings in a still photo, but I assure you that, when seen live, the wings are a total blur.

Anyway, at one point I simply gave up trying to take THE perfect photo, turned off my camera and stood in the middle of the small island watching puffins whiz right past me, above my head and all around me. If I had reached out, I would have been able to touch a few of them, they were that close. It was an amazing experience.

We saw tons of puffins out on the water, diving under the surface (I read that they can go as deep as 70 metres, or 200 feet), floating about or flying low above the water or landing on the water (on their stomachs, from what I could tell). What a sight. We took photos, but most of them came out rather blurry (drat!). This one, though, shows how puffins are able to take off from the water surface. They start moving their little legs faster and faster while madly flapping their wings, looking a bit like comical cartoon characters, until they are finally able to lift their rather plump little bodies up into the air.

Well, we were very lucky to be here on such a glorious day. The owner of the boat who took us to the island told us that there were currently 13,000 puffin pairs there. According to the BBC program I saw, a total of 60,000 pairs are expected to nest on these islands this year. I would like to mention that we also saw hundreds of other sea birds. I read that the Farne Islands host 182 other bird species, from razorbills to shags (see my photo of a nesting shag) and whatnot. Quite a sight. Oh, and the noise!, mamma mia!, mainly from the squacking and screeching sea gulls (I guess). Almost deafening.

You can read more about the Farne Island puffins in this May 2, 2008 Times article: http://tinyurl.com/3p43uf

As you can see, I am still in my holiday mode!

Qigong moves

April 24, 2008 / / 2 Comments

Well, Stefano and I are leaving tomorrow (early afternoon) for Northumberland. Ooooh, I am sooooo excited!!! Puffins, here we come! No Internet until we get back, probably. That will be hard!

Last night Peekaboo entertained us with a series of qigong moves of her own invention. I thought I would share some of the photos I took (when will I learn to take a video with my digital camera???).

First though, a couple of words on the meaning of qigong (which I practice, by the way).

From Wikipedia:

Qigong (or ch’i kung) refers to a wide variety of traditional “cultivation” practices that involve movement and/or regulated breathing designed to be therapeutic. Qigong is practiced for health maintenance purposes, as a therapeutic intervention, as a medical profession, a spiritual path and/or component of Chinese martial arts.

The ‘qi’ in ‘qigong’ means breath or gas in Chinese, and, by extension, ‘life force’, ‘energy’ or even ‘cosmic breath’. ‘Gong’ means work applied to a discipline or the resultant level of skill, so ‘qigong’ is thus ‘breath work’ or ‘energy work’.

The first (above, left) depicts her meditation pose. Before doing any qigong exercises, she indictates, it is important to relax and meditate for a little while.

So do some deep abdominal breathing exercises and push the negative energy downwards and away from your body, as she demonstrates with her paws in photo number one.

Then shift slowly to one side, then to the other (see photo number two, above, right) in order to relax your paws…or arms…thereby increasing your life force.

Photo number three (above, left) gives a demonstration of just how far to the side you can go with this particular qigong exercise. By the way, I would not recommend it to those who suffer from sore backs…

Photo number four (on the right) is Peekaboo’s final move, which provides instant relaxation:

stand on the tip of your toes, pull your paws/arms up, focus on an invisible adversary, whatever that may be (an evil cancer stem cell, perchance?) and…POUNCE!!!

Reviving the dead…

April 21, 2008 / / 5 Comments

Life returns to normal, after a long and rather tiring weekend spent on a translation from English to Italian, which is not my forte, by the way (I do much better from Italian to English). Stefano helped me A LOT (what a guy!

). We finished at 11 p.m. last night. I think I noticed a few more white hairs than usual in the mirror this morning

…but anyway, the main thing is that we did a good job and will be paid well. Indeed.

So I took the morning off…and went to the supermarket where I bought a TON of cat litter that should last for weeks (and we will be gone only ten days…) and then to the cat store where I spent a bucket of money on cat food.

Later on I am going to read at least one study, but for now I will report on a bit of quick and easy news that I read this morning in the “Times of India” (http://tinyurl.com/4tyq5v). Another discovery about the wonders of curcumin: Researchers at New Delhi’s Jamia Hamdard University have successfully used curcumin – extracted from turmeric and broken into nano form – to control and cure cirrhosis of liver in an animal model experiment. “Nano,” huh? How “nano” were these nanoparticles, I wonder? Well, even though the jury is still out on the nano-stuff, in this case the nanocurcumin appears to have worked. Interesting.

And here is another interesting bit: It was found that when used in large doses, turmeric wasn’t particularly useful. But broken into nano particles, it worked wonders. It even reversed cirrhosis which is incurable,” said S Ahmad, vice-chancellor of Jamia Hamdard.

It reversed the…irreversible? Wowie! I imagine, by the way, that the researcher was referring to “curcumin,” not “turmeric.” Well, I suppose I will have to read the study at some point.

Then we read: The curcumin extract is an anti-oxidant that helps revive dead cells. It acts as a repairing agent and can regenerate cells that have broken up into nodules..

Helps revive dead cells, huh? Well, well…well!

Notching cancer stem cells

April 16, 2008 / / 4 Comments

A few days ago I made some connections between a couple of items that I read online and an "old" post of mine. I am still in the "could this possibly be true?!" stage (more like a daze, really). At any rate, I will anticipate a few of my findings today, even though I have only just begun my research on this topic and still have a few things up my sleeve. But let me proceed in chronological order.

On April 12^thand then on April 14^th, I read two Science Daily articles (http://tinyurl.com/4gcjyc and http://tinyurl.com/5h9jom) that reminded me of a rather superficial post I had written on Notch signalling last fall. That’s what started it.

But first, what is Notch signalling? The Science Daily articles tell us that the Notch pathway sends signals from a cell’s surface membrane into its nucleus. Those signals activate genes that instruct the cell to make proteins that perform various tasks. It helps regulate fetal development and is active in most organ systems throughout a person’s life.

A 2005 Science Daily article (http://tinyurl.com/55xlyx) discusses the role of Notch signalling in the development of T cells: no Notch = no T cells, it would seem. So this is a vital pathway. That is, as long as it doesn’t go whacky. But it does, sometimes.

Abnormal increases in Notch signalling can give rise to T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemias, and these increases are present in other cancers as well (myeloma is no exception, hah, figures!): Prior work has shown that increases in signals generated by Notch are important in certain human tumors, particularly some kinds of childhood leukemia, making Notch an attractive target for new cancer therapies.

Big problem, though: researchers were concerned that Notch inhibition might have a negative effect on the normal functioning of the healthy stem cells present in the bone marrow. Another “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation? Would the inhibition of Notch end up actually destroying the bone marrow? A very scary thought, based on the fact that Many scientists have long assumed that blood-forming stem cells need Notch signals to function properly. But let me note that this sentence was written a couple of years ago. Things have changed in the meantime.

A group of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and colleagues has recently demonstrated that inhibition of Notch signalling will not mess up our healthy stem cells. They discovered that the Notch signaling pathway, which determines the development of many cell types, and is also implicated in some cancers, is not universally essential for the maintenance of stem cells. In fact, adult bone marrow stem cells do not require Notch signals. Super!

The University of Michigan Medical School has therefore begun a “groundbreaking trial” that combines chemotherapy with Notch inhibitors: The aim is to use so-called Notch inhibitors to attack cancer stem cells, the small fraction of stem cells inside a tumor that help it survive and that fuel its growth.

Let me highlight this sentence: Notch inhibitors attack cancer stem cells.

Okay, and here is my bombshell of the day…

Curcumin inhibits Notch signalling.