Can you feel the g's?

Let me ask you something. When is the last time you operated a car that was built in 1968? Would you depend on that 40 year old transmission to take you to where you need to go on a road trip? I guess I would have to now answer yes. Because in a similar way, I depended on the wings of a 40 year old Cessna 172 to not fall off in the middle of my first flight as a student pilot. My father, doubling as my flight instructor, saying "Oh they make planes much better than they make cars, don't worry." It was my first real lesson about flight. After you have done your pre-flight check and have diligently assessed the avionics, ailerons, and elevator trim and have lifted off the ground, it is of no real use to then start questioning the structural integrity of the aircraft. I confess that for the first half hour I was doing this. But eventually previous experience kicked in, and I decided to submit to the notion that those things were out of my control and no longer worried about the propellor snapping off. What a metaphor for life! 

Interesting thing about the propellors not working, we were at 5,000 feet level flight. My father reaches for the throttle and pulls it back (off), the propellor stops turning. I look at him and ask, why would you do that? It was the best way to prove to someone that if you lose power you wont just fall out of the sky (we had debated this fact earlier). Actually it was quite nice without the engine, we just sat there both staring forward, cruising quietly through the earth's gorgeous atmosphere, two descendants of the great apes in a metal box impersonating a bird thousands of feet above the ground sailing into the great blue yonder. So if it ever happens don't flip out. The glide ratio is how far you can get as you lose altitude. 20/1 glide ratio for perfect conditions in the 172 means that if I'm 5,280 ft (statute mile), I could technically get 20 miles for an emergency landing. However wind changes this dramatically. 80 knots is the glide speed that maxes out the glide ratio so adjust the yoke and trim accordingly, AFTER first completing the emergency checklist.

I noticed that it is better to be aware of heading, airspeed, weather, and most importantly where you are on the sectional chart! Because when you have to land, you not only have to remember in which direction the airport is, but you have to find it! 

The elevator trim is my friend and makes life much easier, it does away with the need of keeping constant force on the yoke. After setting a climb angle use it to set the yoke. 

I also learned to read the weather reports called METARs, meteorological report. Use this weather service

It will give you a report like this:

KRFD 272254Z 33008KT 8SM OVC008 14/13 A2971 RMK AO2 CIG 005V010 SLP058 T01440133

The first piece:

KRFD

K stands for contiguous United States, I have no idea why the K. RFD is the airport identifier (not code) We actually fly out of poplar grove airport C77, it is uncontrolled (no tower), but we use the Rockford forecasts.

272254Z

The date and time. 27 is the 27th of May at 22:54 zulu (Greenwich mean-time), minus five hours for CST during daylight savings, the time is 5:54 pm the time of the last update. 

33008KT

Winds. 0/360 degrees is north, 90 degrees is east, 180 is south, 270 is west. So here winds are out of 330 or 30 degrees West of North at 8 knots (nautical miles per hour). A nautical mile is 6,075 feet as opposed to 5,280 (statute mile). A nautical mile is one minute of latitude (the distance between north and south pole being 180 degrees). If one degree of latitude has 60 minutes or 60 nautical miles, what is the circumference of the earth?

8SM OVC008

Visibility is 8 statute miles or 8SM. Clouds are overcast at 800 feet or OVC008. If it were 8000 it would have been 080. 80,000 ft is represented as 800, just drop the last two zeroes. 

14/13 A2971

Temperature, dew point, and pressure. 14 degrees celsius, dew point 13 degrees. Set the altimeter to 29.71, thats inches of mercury, one atmosphere being 29.92 inches. As you can tell we are dealing with slightly high pressure. 

RMK AO2 CIG 005V010 SLP058 T01440133

Remarks - AO2 means automatic machine did the reading that can discriminate precipitation (AO1 can't).  CIG variable ceiling from 500 to 1,000 feet. SLP - sea level pressure 058, its in milibars or Pascals 1013.25mbar is one atm, 058 means you dropped the 1-0-1, so pressure is 1010.58. The last is measure is the exact temp and dew point - 14.40 degrees C, and 13.3 degrees C.

You can check the weather anywhere at anytime, it really is a modern marvel. Can you imagine how much riskier things were before this weather service? We are panzies compared to older times.

One time during a turn we banked at 45 degrees, it was a two g turn, it was pretty cool. He looked over and asked, "can you feel the g's?". I wanted to say, "maybe we should ask the wings..."

That was the first day.

On the second day, it was a bit windy. We drove out to the airport anyway, it was such a beautiful day, the only cloud cover was broken at 10,000 feet. The sun was glaring and bright. It was just a little too windy, 16 knots gusting to 21 knots. We called it, not today. We walked back to the car, I was staring at the sky. My father says to me, this is good that this happened, many times you will be tempted to ignore reasons that ground you. But remember, "it is better to be on the ground wishing you were in the sky, than in the sky wishing you were on the ground."  It was a good lesson.

Here is what medical school is like to me.

Here is a montage I made of things you learn in the first year of medical school. The are selected power point slides and lecture excerpts. I think its cute, please enjoy...

Oh its there trust me, cAMP is everywhere, you just can't see it.

cAMP is a VERY important molecule. Here it is: 

This thing is arguably as important as ATP its more hot-headed relative - but look at the trans-phosphodiester bond between C3 and C4, that thing creates significant instability. And so we learned that cAMP binds PKA (protein kinase A) and other intracellular proteins activating them motivating them regulating them. If ATP is your rich uncle that pays for everything, cAMP is the unstable motivational speaker of the subcellular world, it binds inactive enzymes and "animates" them. If you are like me and drink coffee, you would care about all this because the psychostimulant caffeine inhibits phosphodiesterase, the enzyme that breaks the 4' phosphoester bond in cAMP. Thus caffeine indirectly raises cAMP inside the cell, something called disinhibition. 

Here is a new paper out this month.

There was no way to visualize intracellular cAMP for all of time until someone figured out how to show the molecule bound to PKA. The problem with this technique is that it is slow, takes forever, and cannot capture the momentary changes in cAMP that happen during normal physiology. Until now...

Epac is a cAMP exchange factor, like GAPs and GEFs. This is what they did. They took an adeno virus and added Epac-1 (protein holds cAMP), and also tagged it with YFP (yellow fluorescent protein). Then took specific parts of the brainstem known as pre-Botzinger complex neurons that are very sensitive to cAMP (the mediate respiration). They changed the cellular environment a whole bunch of time with different conditions and captured with on a microscope. 

Here is intracellular cAMP 

Here there is the medulla on slice! How nice! NTS - nucleus of the solitary tract, yup there is CNXII hypoglossal right where is should be. I love neuroanatomy. Pretty neat finding, I bet this will be a lab technique that gets a lot of use.

L. Ron Hubbard

Went to the Scientology Church in times square Friday, they play the orientation film every 15 minutes.

                                                 Enjoy!

I have other things to do right now, but the analysis of this film is pretty straightforward-

establish credibility, reveal no dogma only technical and organizational details replete with jargon, overcome objections, promise guaranteed results, personal testimony from people like you and me (plus Kirstie Alley, Jon Travolta, and Isaac Hayes), and confrontational hard sell at the end. BUY our books- all to the backdrop of high romance cinematic soundscapes.

Pay careful attention to the placement of the actors, dressing and stereotyping, as well as the similarity with Christian imagery (cruciform symbol, church, etc...)  

I can see why this would work they're pretty good, and if you're lonely or suggestable you could be headed to the next org for an audit, not that its a bad thing - if it provides community and support, but  I cant comment on whether thats possible with Scientology... it is easy to be cynical about man made religions being for profit. Also - I love self help gurus, I think there enthusiasm is contagious, but it crosses the line at religion.

ps- i didn't film this

Cover Girl

I'm cooking breakfast and this commercial comes on. Its the latest cover girl commerical, and this time Ellen Degeneres is the model... she looks into the camera and says...

"inner beauty is important, but not nearly as important as outer beauty..."

Ellen, shame on you for selling out, you're whole career was built on the fact that you had very little outer beauty but your wit and humor prevailed. If outer beauty is so important, why don't you show us more of your body? Why are you in a black full pant suit in the commercial? Huh? If outer beauty is so important, lets see some legs honey... You were once a role model in full support of the notion that a women could be successful based on her intellect and observation (inner beauty) without having outer beauty, you were even on TV, an evironment notorious for selecting physical beauty.

What kind of message are you sending to all the girls and women in our culture that are already pathologically obsessed with their physical appearance? How much money did they give you?

Idea

What about a children's book series on basic science laws - physics, biochem, cell? They would be very simple and colorfully illustrated and get across major themes in science - I would personify molecules and even try to interweave life lessons into the subcellular plot - e.g. - take ATP a neurotic type A, always doing something, phosphatases are classically depressed - hence blue, always shutting down cell function, just an idea - but the illustrations and visual representations (colors) would be far more important.

Personify but not anthropomorphize, no faces on the molecule, but suggest personality to,

or completely blend them - the nucleus is an infinitely repeating library, it would remind me of Borges Library of Babel

The nuclear transcription factors might be meek and silent librarians, keepers of the maze. It would be a fun project.

Learning II

Eric Kandel gave the final lecture in our neuroscience course on the topic of learning and memory. In the lecture he described some molecular mechanisms behind the development of long term potentiation.

Here is a very important slide from the lecture. This slide depicts the current leading thought behind how long-term potentiation takes place (LTP). I remember that one time from my childhood, I remember my first plane ride, or the kid who bullied me all thanks to long term potentiation. LTP makes me who I am today. It is responsible for my conscious recall of facts, places, names, etc... Explicit memory. 

Quickly, in the bottom left corner a depolarizing excitatory stimulus activates NMDA receptors. Post synaptic intracellular calcium levels rise, and calcium dependent kinases are activated leading to increased levels of cAMP. The residual calcium makes the neuron more excitable for the time being, but in a short while the unbound intracellular calcium is either pumped out or sequestered, this is short term memory. But how do the big events get registered, the ones I will never forget, first kiss, first football season, first day of high school, college, work etc? Its not too different... Back in the neuron lets say instead of having all that calcium sequestered, the calcium containing neuron is repeatedly stimulated. Now the levels of calcium become so high that the levels of cAMP become elevated. Next in line in this molecular mousetrap is that protein kinase A which finally has the strength to fully dissociate from its regulatory subunit and remain activated. PKA in turn activates MAPK pathway, and the both of them make their merry way into the nucleus. Inside the nucleus (from Latin, nux, kernel, nut or inner part), cAMP response element binding protein or CREB for short is altered by these newly entered enzymes. CREB1 increases transcription and CREB2 decreases transcription of certain genes. CREB2 is silenced, CREB1 is freed and the initiation new protein synthesis can now occur. What are these new "memory" proteins?  New receptors, neuroligins, neurexins, etc... essentially things that make the connection between the two neurons more substantial. 

So Dr. Kandel brought up the interesting point that with new protein synthesis, there are physical changes in the brain when LTP occurs. If for some reason I remembered his talk, his words would have affected my memory, or ultimately the structure of my brain. Yes, the physical structure of my brain is altered, however insignificant, my brain would have weaker or stronger connectivities. Life has taught me that certain instances where my brain has been restructured have been more significant than others if you catch my drift.

Its interesting to speculate on the ramifications of his point because I believe personality is a very subtle and sensitive biological phenomenon. To the extent that aspects of my personality are learned, I have the responsibility to guard and culture my brain's connections in a responsible fashion. Which brings up another interesting point that was made in lecture. Here's another slide:

The slide proposes a mechanism for behavior disorders. I can not tell you how relieved I am that there is a molecular mechanism (pysch needs it badly, talk for another day). In the top row, labeled A, we have schizophrenia. Many are hard at work developing the pathogenesis of this disorder, there is a dopamine, serotonin, glutamate, and now a gene regulation hypothesis. Probably multifactorial, its a way to explain the behavior associated with this disorder. But take in row B there is normal behavior contrasted with that of a behavior associated with PTSD. This would be the first look into a molecular explanation of how a negative behavior is learned, reinforcing on a molecular scale. I'm just spitballing here, but it could be a justification for CBT. 

After lecture I had some questions, I asked:

What about CREB2 -/-?

How do you believe memory and creativity or intelligence overlap?

Why is learning in the critical period (time when a child where everything is easy) different than learning as an adult?

Answers:

CREB2 knockouts display quicker learning but reach a ceiling in their capacity. I gathered that there are too many other moving parts to look for a silver bullet. 

Memory does not map intelligence or creativity very well. He cited an anecdote of an artist who could not add six and six, yet was capable of creating stimulating visual art. I'm beginning to understand that intelligence, and most importantly creativity, is probably some sort of meta-cognitive function. I can't understand how I remember my name, so I'll save explaining why Chopin choose C# minor for another day. 

Learning language, music, mathematics, basically anything, is far easier as a child because the synaptic connections are looser, more susceptible to influence. What a double edged sword! 

Is there a way back? My belief is that there is, it just hasn't been found. The more I listen and learn the more it becomes apparent that we need to increase our appetite for risk. What a pleasure it is to learn of others labors and discoveries, but it is also wonderful to suppose what a breakthrough in that field could do for humanity. Research into subtle phenomena that make us human are poorly represented in animal models. In the name of science we decerebrate cats, inject poison into the veins of primates, and quite literally play God with the genome of mice. All for good reason I'm sure, but are we so much removed? Responsible but experimental and exploratory research should take place on willing and consenting humans. Our understanding of biology will necessitate a greater confrontation of the certain unavoidable truth that we are as much animal as human.