Today I Learned:
1) Transcranial magnetic stimulation has been approved for medical use! ...for treating drug-resistant depression. Really? I mean, if it helps, that's awesome, but of all the amazing things that technology could do, we're using it solely to treat depression? I'm a bit disappointed. At least this means it checks out as safe by the FDA.
(For those not in the know yet, transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, is the use of a giant multi-Tesla magnet to temporarily shut down parts of the brain. It's been played with fairly extensively, and is surprisingly less dangerous than it sounds -- rare side effects include fainting, dizziness, and VERY rarely, seizures. Oh, and some forms make a really loud clicking noise that can be hard on the ears. And there's a version that uses magnets on the scalp that can get hot enough to irritate. And that's about it.)
2) SENS has come up, supposedly, with a way to target mRNAs to the mitochondria. That's kind of a game-changer for their mitoSENS program (moving copies of the mitochondrial genes into the nucleus). Before, they'd had a lot of trouble getting nuclearly-expressed proteins shuttled to the mitochondria -- there are lots of proteins that already do that, but the remaining ones are much more polar and therefore hard to get through the membrane. By targeting mRNAs instead of proteins, SENS gets around that entirely. Brilliant!
Also, if you donate $30,000 to the project, you get to travel to SENS headquarters in San Francisco and have dinner with James Edward Olmos. Seriously.
3) ...the smell of ginkgo tree fruit. It's somewhere beween blue cheese and the back of an unwashed ear. It's not an entirely unpleasant smell... but I can see why they have a reputation for being smelly.
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