new research

OAS Wednesday - Semen Boosts the Immune System! Helps HIV

kbonham — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 17:59:38 +0000

OAS Wednesday - Semen Boosts the Immune System! Helps HIV

One of the things that bugs me most in pop-sci and woo-woo science is the obsession with "boosting" the immune system. The immune system is in a constant balancing act - tip it too far one way and even normally harmless bacteria become life-threatening. But tilt it too far in the other direction, and you can end up with things like allergies and autoimmunity. And some pathogens have learned to take advantage of your normal immune responses, meaning that "boosting" your immune system can sometimes do more harm than good. A good case-in-point is a recent paper published in PLoS Pathogens:

IL-7 enhances replication of laboratory strains and primary isolates of HIV-1 in human lymphoid and cervico-vaginal tissues ex vivo

Background

Interleukin 7 (IL-7) is a type molecule called a "cytokine." Cytokines are chemical signals that cells of the immune system uses to communicate with each other. Some cytokines activate the immune system, some block the immune system, some act on particular cells to stimulate growth or activate one cell type while inhibiting others.

IL-7 is commonly thought of as a growth factor, specifically for T-cells, one of the major parts of the adaptive immune system. During HIV infection, one of the major problems leading to the disease AIDS is a dramatic decrease in T-cells that leaves people vulnerable to other infections. Because IL-7 increases the development of T-cells, several groups have been interested in using IL-7 as a therapy for HIV infected individuals to bring up their T-cell count. This idea seems rational enough: the problem with AIDS patients is a lack of T-cells. IL-7 increases T-cell counts. Therefore, we should use IL-7 as a therapy for AIDS patients. In fact, the company Cytheris is in a stage 2 clinical trial to do just that.

But if you know anything about HIV, you might have noticed a problem. HIV loooooves to infect T-cells. In fact, that's why AIDS patients have low T-cell counts: HIV has killed them all. This means that increasing T-cell counts may have the perverse effect of giving HIV more targets to infect and more factories in which to replicate.

As far as therapy goes, this probably isn't a concern. If a patient has so few T-cells that they need this therapy, it's clear that HIV is winning. In that case, reviving the patient's immune system is the most pressing concern, and the long term consequences of helping HIV are moot. If someone is bleeding out, you need to stop the bleeding, even if it means using your dirty hands that might give them an infection.

But the propensity of IL-7 to help out HIV is a concern in another realm - transmission. In someone that isn't already infected, having more T-cells around could make the difference between an infectious encounter and a non-infectious encounter. That's where this new research comes in. It seems that HIV positive men may actually prime their partner's immune system to make them more susceptible to infection with HIV.

See, semen is not just sperm in an innocuous fluid. It contains all sorts of other factors, including hormones ~~that may improve mood~~*, stuff from food that the man has eaten (including allergens), and cytokines that modulate the partner's immune system. Scientists have long known that semen contains cytokines that dampen the immune response, a feature that makes sense from an evolutionary perspective (you don't want your partner's immune system attacking your sperm). But scientists have also noticed that semen contains IL-7, and that levels of IL-7 are higher in men with HIV.

So Andrea Introini et al decided to see what effect if any this might have on HIV transmission rates.

The concentration of interleukin (IL)-7, one of the most prominent cytokines in semen of healthy individuals, is further increased in semen of HIV-1-infected men. Here, we investigated the potential role of IL-7 in HIV-1 vaginal transmission in an ex vivo system of human cervico-vaginal tissue.

Methods

Since it would be tough to do experiments on couples in the wild, they instead turned to an experimental model, using explants of vaginal tissue** grown in a petri dish. Basically, they would take donations of tissue from patients that were undergoing hysterectomies, and keep that tissue alive in the lab. In this way, they could expose the tissue to HIV in the presence of experimentally controlled levels of IL-7. There are certainly problems with drawing conclusions from this system, but it's probably as close as you can get to doing controlled experiments in a natural system without actually infecting people. You'll lose some of the interactions with the rest of the immune system, but at least you've got an entire tissue instead of isolated cells.

Using this system, they then measured a number of different outputs, from HIV replication (literally counting the number of viruses produced), to the number of T-cells that are infected with HIV. Towards the end of the paper, they tried to explain a mechanism by which IL-7 could cause the results they see. I'll get to how that was done in the results section.

Results

The most notable result is probably evident from the title: IL-7 increases HIV infection and replication.

Figure 2a and 2b show increased HIV replication in vaginal tissue that has been exposed to IL-7

In the top graph, they are showing you the concentration of HIV virus particles found in the medium the tissues are bathed in. The dotted line is with tissue grown w/o IL-7, the dashed line is tissue grown in a low concentration of IL-7, and the solid line is tissue grown with a high amount of IL-7. The lower graph is basically the same data, but looking at the final concentration of HIV in each of the IL-7 conditions compared to the non-IL-7 condition. In other words, tissues in the presence of low dose IL-7 tended to have about twice as much HIV replication as tissue grown without IL-7, and the high dose tended to increase replication by 5-6 fold.

But why have both graphs if they're showing essentially the same thing?

When working with human tissue, you can often get wildly different results in terms of actual numbers, but scientists don't trust data that comes from a single experiment - you need to replicate it several times. But if the authors had included multiple trials in that top graph, they could have had enormous error bars due to variation in the tissue that was used, so the top graph is showing a "representative" experiment. In the second graph, they normalize each experiment to the non-IL-7 control within that experiment, so they can graph them all together. Had they been using genetically identical mice, this might have raised some eyebrows, but when doing experiments with human tissue, it's totally acceptable.

In order to look at why IL-7 might be doing this, they decided to look at the effects of IL-7 on the T-cells present in the tissues that they were treating. T-cells that are infected with virus are often profoundly unhappy, and unhappy cells often commit cell-suicide. Cells committing suicide is often a good thing, because it prevents problems (like viral infections) from spreading, but IL-7 seems to prevent these infected T-cells killing themselves off, giving HIV more time to replicate and more opportunities to infect other T-cells.

This later result isn't terribly surprising, as IL-7 is known to be a growth factor , and several studies have shown that it can inhibit cell suicide, but it was important for these authors to demonstrate that it is still having this effect in the presence of HIV infection

Caveats / Discussion

I think this paper is an important advance, if for no other reason than highlighting a potential problem with using IL-7 as a treatment for HIV. It's important to understand factors that contribute to increasing HIV transmissiveness, and I was pleased that the authors did not suggest that this might lead to potential treatments or preventions, since blocking IL-7 during sex would be pretty impractical. Still, it's important to qualify what this paper does and doesn't show.

The paper does not show the effect of IL-7 in semen on the cells of an actual vagina. These are chunks of tissue floating in a bath of media, with a fairly high concentration of a cytokine present for long periods of time. The authors cite papers showing that semen from healthy men can contain 1-2 nanograms (1/1,000,000,000 of a gram) per milliliter, and that concentrations can be up to 100 times higher in HIV infected men. The lowest does the authors use in this study is 5 ng/mL, which seems reasonable until you realize that a typical ejaculate only contains a couple of milliliters of fluid, and that this would likely be significantly diluted out in the tissue. Further, I'm not sure anyone knows how long these cytokines are likely to persist before being used up or destroyed in the woman's genital track.

The authors did try to address that in Figure 3, where they showed that a brief treatment of IL-7 was enough to enhance replication of HIV. But it's still a fairly long pre-treatment (~16 hours), and it's hard to know if the concentrations are anywhere near what would be experienced in real life.

Shorter pre-treatment with IL-7 is sufficient to enhance HIV replication (Figure 3)

Another problem is that this study mostly evaluates the cytokine IL-7 in isolation. As I mentioned above, semen contains all kinds of stuff, including cytokines that dampen the immune system. Unfortunately, the authors note that seminal plasma from donors is toxic to cells in culture, so the best experiment (exposing tissue to seminal plasma from healthy vs HIV infected donors) is not really possible. The authors did experiments in lymphoid tissue (which contains A LOT of immune cells) with diluted seminal plasma, but I'm not convinced that these experiments add much.

I should emphasize that none of these caveats are deal breakers. Experimenting with HIV is hard, and every model we have has significant limitations. This is an interesting paper, filled with good experiments. There's definitely more to do, and more to know, but then again, that's always the case in science. It's also worth noting that the authors of this paper did not stretch their results to make grandiose claims based on their data. I don't know if this is because of the authors' restraint or good peer review, but it's always nice to see in papers with a high potential for exaggeration.

[OAS (open access science) wednesday is an attempt to highlight research published in Open Access Journals like PLoS, eLife and PeerJ. Here are some reasons why I think OAS is important. Also check out the Open Science Federation]

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*See this post for why the claims that hormones in semen probably don't affect mood.

**As an aside, the authors actually didn't restrict the study to vaginal tissue. They also looked at tonsillar tissue (representing the throat), and actually led with a figure on lymphoid tissue (part of the immune system). I'm guessing they did the initial experiments in lymphoid tissue because it's filled with immune cells and probably easier to get enough cells to measure. The results were essentially the same in all of the tissues that they looked at though.

kbonham Tue, 02/19/2013 - 12:59

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Immune system

Microbes always win

hiv

new research

sex

Unintended Consequences

jjacquet — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 12:52:06 +0000

Unintended Consequences

We need to pay closer attention to how hunting and fishing regulations are set or we may end up with unintended negative consequences for the species we are trying to protect. This according to new research reported in The New York Times. We know that target species can react to increased predation by humans (which is far different from the type of predation that occurs in the wild, where predators prefer the young and dying). We saw this in the cod fishery when cod evolved to reproduce at younger ages and smaller sizes. Daniel Pauly, the father of shifting baselines, is also quoted in the article, so have a look.

jjacquet Tue, 01/13/2009 - 07:52

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new research

Solutions

Thankss!^s

very good sites

S'il y a bien une espÃ¨ce vivante qui n'est pas en voie de disparition c'est bien le poisson !
C'est vrai que: les plus gros consommateurs de poissons sont... les poissons ! BÃªh ouais. Les gros mangent les petits. Donc, siiiiii l'homme intelligent crÃ©e des fermes aquacoles pour Ã©lever une catÃ©gories bien spÃ©cifique de poissons (par exemple: la sardine, ou le hareng, ou le thon ou le... bref) tout en sachant que les sardines ne se mangent pas entre elles etc, etc, et, que si l'on donne des cÃ©rÃ©ales et des dÃ©chets d'abatoirs aux poissons...
Suffit d'y penser.

S'il y a bien une espÃ¨ce vivante qui n'est pas en voie de disparition c'est bien le poisson ! C'est vrai que: les plus gros consommateurs de poissons sont... les poissons ! BÃªh ouais. Les gros mangent les petits. Donc, siiiiii l'homme intelligent crÃ©e des fermes aquacoles pour Ã©lever une catÃ©gories bien spÃ©cifique de poissons (par exemple: la sardine, ou le hareng, ou le thon ou le... bref) tout en sachant que les sardines ne se

Thanks a lot.

Thankss!^s
Evden Eve Nakliyat

Thanx a lot

thanks for post

vante qui n'est pas en voie de disparition c'est bien le poisson ! C'est vrai que: les plus gros consommateurs de poissons sont... les poissons ! BÃªh ouais. Les gros mangent les petits. Dissertation Writing

vante qui n'est pas en voie de disparition c'est bie Dissertation Writing

I'd love to take one of those for a spin. We need a lambo rental service in Pittsburgh. Any takers.

vante qui n'est pas en voie de disparition c'est bien le poisson ! C'est vrai que: les plus gros consommateurs de poissons sont... les poissons ! BÃªh ouais. Les gros mangent les petit

We need a lambo rental service in Pittsburgh. Any takers.

l y a bien une espÃ¨ce vivante qui n'est pas en voie de disparition c'est bien le poisson ! C'est vrai que: les plus gros consommateurs de poissons sont... les poissons ! BÃªh ouais. Les gros mangent les petits. Donc, siiiiii l'homme intelligent crÃ©e des fermes aquacoles pour Ã©lever une catÃ©gories bien spÃ©cifique de poisson

I downloaded the application and to say it has changed the way I work would be an understatement! Very intuitive, simply awesomeâ¦.

More Insight into Whale Feeding Behavior

jjacquet — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 14:48:37 +0000

More Insight into Whale Feeding Behavior

Food is the name of the game this week (well, food, and trampling store employees on Black Friday). And friend and fellow Ph.D. student here at UBC, Jeremy Goldbogen (photographed with a minke whale jaw bone), has some new research out this week on the feeding habits of humpback whales and it dons the cover of the current issue of The Journal of Experimental Biology. Jeremy and his colleagues found that lunge-feeding requires a large amount of energy compared to other behaviors--humpback whales breathe three times harder after returning to the surface from a foraging dive than from singing. For more on whale feeding, also visit Carl Zimmer's article about Goldbogen et al.'s research in The New York Times last year.

jjacquet Fri, 11/28/2008 - 09:48

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new research

Thank you

Personally, I find fasting enjoyable. Shorter fasts help me reduce calories and I believe my mental performance increases slightly. Longer fasts I use primarily as a means to cleanse myself, but I wouldn't do a long fast if I have to work. I also think that fasting has improved my discipline in eating healthy

The New, Warmer Baseline: No Coral Reefs

jjacquet — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 07:42:09 +0000

The New, Warmer Baseline: No Coral Reefs

"A new global deal on climate change will come too late to save most of the world's coral reefs...major ecological damage to the oceans is now inevitable." This according to The Guardian, which reports the finding of a new study in Geophysical Research Letters. The authors of the study found that the risk posed by carbon pollution to coral and marine life could justify a carbon stabilisation goal "lower than what might be chosen based on climate considerations alone". I feel paralyzed by this type of news. The only thing I feel I could do is abandon all responsibility and spend the next year diving on the last remaining pristine reefs so that when everyone else's baselines shifts to accept a coral-less world as natural, I remember (and lament the passing of) these underwater marvels. Knitting will be all we have left. It's positively heartbreaking.

Warmer waters, vanishing reefs

jjacquet Thu, 10/30/2008 - 03:42

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new research

Jen...

I don't have to tell you that the complex process of framing of environmental problems to the public for maximum conservation action is somewhat of a balancing act. A tension exists between conveying often-times grim environmental realities while still maintaining hope.

This tension results in part from what decision options we offer and the tone of the message as well as from our audiences norms, habits, and unique temperaments.

I honestly feel that Cao and Caldeira's recent published study didn't consider the possibility that their message would instill in the general public precisely your suggested response: "Abandon hope all ye who read this."

While I'm confident that Cao and Caldeiras motivations were to catalyze public demand for policy action (and perhaps they are strategically employing the "scare frame"), I fear that the grim message and sour prognosis for global coral reefs is the most enduring effect.

The overwhelming reaction from the global news media picking-up this report has not focused upon solutions to the coral crisis, but rather on the bleak outlook. By far the most common headline to run with the story has been, "Cutting back on CO2 may be too late for Coral Reefs."

We need to communicate the science in ways that foster hope and action rather than denial and despair. I can't believe I'm actually quoting Matt Nisbet, but he's spot on in reminding scientists that, "This does not require scientists to abandon rigor or objectivity." But it does suggest they consider framing their message for generating solutions rather than defeat.

If Obama and the Dems win on Tues. (and even if they don't), we need to push the OCEANS 21 bill in Congress.

thanks the topics

Not to worry, Everything will be fine according to Steven Goddard on the weatherman's blog.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/31/ocean-acidification-and-corals/

anywhere in this blog are really very good about not coincide

Catfish: Lackluster No More

jjacquet — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 06:42:45 +0000

Catfish: Lackluster No More

Say hello to delecata, a high grade specially filleted piece of North American farmed catfish. This new name was created with hopes of boosting the profile and profits of a struggling industry. In The New York Times Magazine, Paul Greenberg tells the story of U.S. southern fish farmers competing in a global marketplace and a catfish by any other name.

You can put lipstick on a catfish but it's still a catfish. A new name, though? That's another matter...

jjacquet Thu, 10/16/2008 - 02:42

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new research

Sounds good to me. Farm raised catfish are highly sustainable, and make for a really good lobster substitute in a lot of dishes. Not to mention being delectable on their own. I'll take mine blackened please.

If you don't care for catfish you can always eat basa. (chuckle)

For the emerging market in eastasia, you should market them as fishcat.

This is all very interesting but I, for one, would prefer fewer pictures of fish and more pictures of Jennifer.

Yes Thats is a good idea. Thanks a lot

My granddaughter was watching a cooking show and wanted to see a picture of a real catfish. Thank you for the site. Jennifer is very beautiful, but I am glad for the Catfish picture. Men will be men. Thank you

Now if we can get Jennifer to come for dinner- poached catfish a la buerre - and some white wine...
Well as we say in the South, "aint nothing finer."

Seriously, while Jennifer is a right sweet looker, Im glad to see the catfish is at least holding its own as a food source. The "prairie trout" has long been a favorite angling fish of mine. I would ratehr fish for cats than anything else in freshwater.

I reckon that the more we farm and sustainably produce them via aquaculture - the more of them available to me as sport!
Thanks.

An interesting animal. Thanks

I like a catfish.

The catfish some are lovely?

thanks for information Jennifer is very beautiful, but I am glad for the Catfish picture

Et Tu Pollock?

jjacquet — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:47:10 +0000

Et Tu Pollock?

Pollock, the poster child for sustainable fishing, appears to be on the brink of collapse. I have more on the state of Bering Sea pollock fishery in my guest post at the Gristmill...

jjacquet Tue, 10/14/2008 - 10:47

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new research

There was an excellent TV program about the factory ship fishery for pollock a couple of months back. Very interesting and scarily impressive. They were harvesting pollock by the jillion tons per trawl, and completely processing them assembly line fashion. Absolutely no waste; everything completely processed into a saleable product and packaged ready to sell. Boxes of processed and frozen McDonald fish squares ready to ship, bags of fish meal, etc. The gonads were harvested, frozen and packaged for shipment to Japan. I think they got $250 a pound for them. The rest of the catch was the break-even and the gonads were the profit. Maybe you can find the program on the internet.

Isn't it a bit alarmist to conclude that a fishery is on the brink of collapse from one bad year? Populations, like stock markets, go up and down.

I commented on this at "The Intersection", but I'll reiterate that in order to save the fisheries, the massive overconsumption of imperiled seafood species by societies in which seafood consumption is traditional (Japan takes the lead, but Spain is another major player) must be significantly reduced. Otherwise, they will revisit the "Tragedy of the Commons" on numerous fisheries, as has already happened for those (like Grand Banks cod) that have collapsed.

Thanks a lot

good site

Thanks for your share sure ..

McDonald fish squares ready to ship, bags of fish meal, etc. The gonads were harvested, frozen and packaged for shipment to Japan. I think they got $250 a pound for them. The rest of the catch was the break-even and the gonads were the profit. Maybe you can find the program on the internet.

And damn, I wish I could write like you! I'm sorry you have such a heartbreaking story to tell, but you tell it so very well.

I think people differ greatly on this issue. For example, if it were completely unidentifiable as my own, I would have no problem with a picture of my naked ass being posted on the Internet. Others would be absolutely horrified by the prospect.

I think they got $250 a pound for them. The rest of the catch was the break-even and the gonads were the profit. Maybe you can find the program on the internet.

Kosmodisk Classic Set, kan dolaÅÄ±mÄ±nÄ± kolaylaÅtÄ±rarak yorgun kaslarÄ±n Ä±sÄ±nmasÄ±na, yumuÅamasÄ±na ve rahatlamasÄ±na dolayÄ±sÄ±yla aÄrÄ±larÄ±n azalmasÄ±na yardÄ±mcÄ± olur.

I think they got $250 a pound for them. The rest of the catch was the break-even and the gonads were the profit. Maybe you can find the program on the internet.

Mislabeled Fish

jjacquet — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 07:12:41 +0000

Mislabeled Fish

In 1992, Consumer Reports published an article titled, "The label said Snapper, the lab said baloney". Fifteen years later, the mislabeling of red snapper is, if anything, more widespread. A 2004 study in Nature showed 75 percent of red snapper sold in the U.S. is some other fish.

Menus offer up red snapper despite that it has been overfished for the last half-century. Red snapper mysteriously existing in restaurants but not in the sea is resolved by mislabeling, which prevents us from perceiving red snapper is actually in trouble. It's as if we are eating some ghost of bygone years, when fish were abundant and there was no need to call them anything but their proper names.

A 2006 investigation of eleven Florida restaurants selling grouper uncovered that six out of eleven groupers were phonies--often catfish. This investigation revealed a personal favorite case of renaming/mislabeling--plain old catfish called "Grouper teammate." Only five of the eleven tested groupers were legit, including one bought at a Hooters franchise, which was particularly surprising since other features at Hooters are often fake.

At the core of the problem is that mislabeled seafood gives consumers the false sense that supply is keeping up with demand. Consumers are sold sablefish as 'black cod', groupers as 'rock cod' and pollock as just plain 'cod'. The collapse of Atlantic cod might have gotten a lot of media, but to many consumers, cod stocks seem just fine.

Unfortunately, testing seafood to ensure it is properly labeled has become increasingly difficult as trade in seafood expands. We must worry not only about policing U.S.-caught fish but also foreign seafood distributors. In 1995, the U.S. imported 54% of its seafood. Today, 83% of U.S. seafood is imported from an estimated 13,000 foreign suppliers in 160 different nations. And while the European Union tests 20-50% of its imports in any year, the U.S. tested less than one percent of seafood imports in 2006.

A seafood labeling system is needed that can track fish from aqua-cradle to plate. The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), which certifies and eco-labels seafood, implemented standards to follow fish through the supply chain. This chain of custody model could be used worldwide. Daniel Pauly and I discuss this idea in our review paper Trade Secrets: Renaming and Mislabeling of Seafood. This month, Conservation Magazine's Douglas Fox covered the topic in a great article on Imposter Fish. Read more here.

jjacquet Sun, 10/12/2008 - 03:12

Tags

new research

What the?

since other features at Hooters are often fake

Please post your evidence for that assertion. Jpg evidence preferred.

I've read about this issue a few times, but only today did a minor side effect of this occur to me. My husband and I keep kosher, but we do eat fish at non-kosher restaurants.

I wonder how often we've been served an unkosher fish (such as catfish) when we thought we were getting something such as snapper?

Obviously I don't think anyone's going to be struck down by lightning because of this deception, but it certainly is quite rude to customers! (Hmm, I wonder if there's anyone out there who's allergic to just *some* fish, but not others.)

I find this a bit disturbing and dangerous. Recently I developed an allergy to tilapia; as far as I know it is the only fish I am allergic to. If I order a certain type of fish at a restaurant, I darn well better receive what I think I'm asking for.

Obviously I don't think anyone's going to be struck down by lightning because of this deception...

If you're so sure, why do you continue to observe?

Just pointing out that the link behind the chart has a " to much attached.

nice page web

I strongly suspect that this statement will represent my own unzipping of my ignorance and waggling it around for all to mock, but:

Anselm defines God as something that exists (God is that than which no greater can be conceived), and then uses that premise to conclude that God exists. How is this worth more than a few seconds consideration before you give it a gigantic "pfff"?

No really, how? I'm clearly missing something here...

Animals are friends of human beings to kill animals is a crime, we should stop them, I support the author.

Updates, Updates, Updates

jjacquet — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 13:45:50 +0000

Updates, Updates, Updates

A lowdown of what's happening with the oceans and the people that care about them:

1) Dr. Jeremy Jackson delivers a lecture on the Brave New Ocean tonight at Harvey Mudd College.

2) Oceana is again running their Freakiest Fish contest. Check out their site and vote for your favorite freak fish. Currently the vampire squid is in the lead.

3)Another deep-sea dwelling fish that is "surprisingly cute" (and thus not up for freakiest fish) has been filmed for the first time by a Japan-UK team. It is suspected Pseudoliparis amblystomopsis is the deepest living fish found to date. Watch footage of it at the BBC.

4) At least jellyfish are good for something! Today two Americans and one Japanese scientist share the chemistry Nobel Prize in part for discovering how to exploit the genetic mechanism responsible for luminosity in jellyfish. The technique was then used in all sorts of medical ways, like to tag brain cells and cancer cells. Read more here.

5) Check out the new Microdocs: The Short Attention Span Science Theater on Ecological Sustainability with Steve Palumbi

6) Something FREE in New York? Huh? You didn't think it was possible but it's true. The Senate Groundlings film from Shifting Baselines will be shown as part of an evening of free science films in Brooklyn on Wednesday, October 22nd. Looks like a fun event for New Yorkers!

That's all for now, people. More soon!

jjacquet Wed, 10/08/2008 - 09:45

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Communicating

new research

Thanks a lot. Yes Thats is a gigilaguhan. very good

very good sites

Why I Regret My New Toilet Seat

jjacquet — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 07:22:24 +0000

Why I Regret My New Toilet Seat

I recently bought a new wooden toilet seat at Target for five dollars. Five dollars! It wasn't even on sale and I thought to myself, "What a steal!" I should have known that was probably, literally the case. My toilet seat was probably illegally logged in Russia. In this week's issue of The New Yorker, Raffi Khatchadourian (who also wrote the great profile of Paul Watson) writes about the illegal logging market. The article is not quite online yet, but check out this short video where he discusses how a tree illegally logged from halfway around the world becomes a toilet seat at your local Wal-Mart (or Target, I'm sure).

jjacquet Wed, 10/01/2008 - 03:22

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new research

Oh, come on. How can you put toilets and illegal logging in the same post.

I'm not even sure what illegal logging is - forgetting to flush afterwards?

I didn't even know what some of our toilet seats were made of. This site says they are made of either plastic -- easy to identify -- or wood flour and melamine, combined at high temperatures to create a kind of molded wood:
www.madehow.com/Volume-5/Toilet.html
The wood flour comes from sawdust and there is plenty of sawdust, so it is good that it gets used.
I've never seen a real wood toilet seat made of pieces of wood instead of the above "molded wood."
This article talks about sawdust and its uses:
www.agmrc.org/agmrc/commodity/biomass/sawdustshavingswoodwaste/sawdustp…
Why is it cheaper to get wood from Russia than to use recycled sawdust here at home?

Ä°ntersting I Dont Sitting This Toilet :D

Thank You Very Funny Toilet

How Jellies Got Their Sting

jjacquet — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 15:02:50 +0000

How Jellies Got Their Sting

With jellies on the rise and overlapping with more and more people, it is good to know how they got their sting. According to some new research, it seems ancestor jellies might have gotten their defense capabilities from a bacterium via horizontal gene transfer. Read more at Nature.

jjacquet Sun, 09/28/2008 - 11:02

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new research

Surely this would have been a good intro to showcase your jelly aquarium!

It's coming! (Just can't find my camera cord at the moment...)

thanks

Thanks a lot