The Hangover Cure

As everyone at School of Mines knows E-days is this weekend! For those outside of the Mines community E-days is the weekend our wonderful school, parts of Denver and the city of Golden throw all of the aspiring engineers a party. Which means there will be massive amounts of alcohol consumed this weekend, but only by those of us over 21 of course. So I decided to do a very important post on hangovers and the medications taken for them. There are many options out there to choose from like Chaser, Sob'r-K Hangover Stopper, RU-21, Berocca and Rebound. So which is best and why?

Lets start off with a little background on how these pills work. Most hangover pills, as I understand it, have some form of carbon that filters out impurities from your drink kind of like a Britta water filter. These impurities combined with your bodies dehydration from the alcohol are what make you feel sick the next day, or so they claim.  


Much to my surprise though I can not find too many bad reviews on the internet. Everyone who has taken these pills other than RU-21 has said that they worked fantastic with Chaser and Nitekap seeming to be the best. I am still very skeptical though since most of these pills require you to take them with one or two large glasses of water around 4 times a night for moderate drinking. Most people do not normally drink that much water whilst drinking which could be a major contributer to no hangover. I will have to try to hold a study two nights over E-days one night where people take a multivitamin and lots of water throughout the night, and one night where they take the hangover pill as directed. My hypothesis is that the water and multivitamin will work just as well for much cheaper since hangover pills average about $1/pill. 


Have a great and safe E-days everyone. Stay safe, don't puke and rally. That is a great way to end up in a hospital.       

Fukushima: Tragedy for Most, Gold Mine for Select Few

There is no arguing that the tsunami and earthquake that hit Fukushima Japan was bad new bears, but from this wreckage some sellers of radiation meds are making out like bandits. Before you go hating pharmaceutical companies do know that many have donated a substantial number of radiation medications to the relief effort. Most are still making a healthy profit though.

One company in particular that is really moving forward because of this disaster is Cleavland BioLabs. They recently started the process of getting their disaster radiation medication called CBLB502 through the FDA, and in order to be able to use this drug in Fukushima the FDA might be fast tracking it through testing. This would allow Cleavland BioLabs to donate and sell their drug in Japan and around the world much faster and cheaper than anticipated greatly increasing the companies profits.

I am not sure how CBLB502 works but I do know it is substantially different from any other medication on the market and works both pre and post exposure to radiation. Traditional radiation medications include lots of iodine in some form and work by having that iodine fill all iodine receptors in the body, most of which are in the thyroid. With all iodine receptors full radioactive iodine-131, one of the most common forms of radiation, can not bind anywhere in the body. If iodine is not taken around radiation or if it is taken for a long sustained period of time it can cause problems in the thyroid. The thyroid is responsible for the regulation of many hormones including ones involved with metabolism and calcium storage and usage.

I would like to know how you feel about companies making profits off of disasters. Is it a win-win out of a bad situation? The companies get money which they can invest in making better products and the people get the medications they need to survive. Or is it just greedy CEO's taking advantage of the mis-fortunate people of Fukushima?

For more information on Cleavland BioLabs please visit:
http://www.cbiolabs.com/
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110314-712174.html

Self Evaluation II

I have been posting 2 times a week and commenting on about 4 posts a week. I have been trying to to get more reader engagement by different and more interesting post topics which has been mildly successful. I hope my most recent post on Fukushima will get a lot of response. I fell it is a really strong post. As far as earlier posts I am not really sure what you were trying to draw out on the last barrage of comments you left and I was hoping to talk to you about it after class tomorrow. I am also starting to run dry on topics to write about and could use some help there as well.

I have done the required number of posts with decent length and content and I feel I am again deserving of a B grade.

Resident Evil Has Some Explaining to Do

As you can see I have the Umbrella Corporation logo as the background to this blog. For those who don't know Umbrella is a fictional pharmaceutical company from the game Resident Evil. In the game Umbrella, in their attempts to create a drug to produce super soldiers made the t-virus that would vastly change the host DNA without killing it. It consistently made humans more aggressive along with a few other changes specific to the individual. A few unforeseen side effects from the virus were decomposition of the hosts skin and reanimation of dead tissue. This of course led to hordes of zombies you have to hack and slash your way through to beat the game.

The virus originated from a natural virus in Africa called the Progenitor virus and when combined with leech DNA creates the t-virus. I haven't the slightest idea what part of leech DNA can reanimate dead tissue and the creators of the game don't bother explaining their thoughts of how this would work.

So, to the creators of the Resident Evil game I ask why base the game on a virus that you can't even begin to explain how it works. You just coped out and said it changes the hosts DNA. All viruses change the hosts DNA in the cells they infect but they do not all lead to zombies. What is different about this virus? How is able to reanimate dead tissue? Viruses are not alive and need living tissue "take over" and help it replicate. Dead tissue can not perform this function and therefore the virus can not infect it. If the virus can not even infect dead tissue how could it possibly reanimate it? I enjoyed playing the game but the creators just ignored so many biological questions. I think the game could have been much better if the actual premise of it would have been more plausible or if they would at least try to explain it. I know most people don't care what makes the zombies they just want to shoot them, but there are a few others like me that would like to know why and how these zombies were made making shooting them all the more enjoyable.

Do Your Genes Have a Little Extra Junk in the Trunk?

Everyone has genes that are referred to as junk genes; actually nearly half of our genes are junk genes. Junk genes are just sequences of our genome that scientists can not discern. Some of these junk genes do have a purpose and scientists just have not figured out what it is yet. Others are truly junk and do not code for anything. These will be the genes I am referring to as junk in the rest of this post. The current theory to explain the waste in our genome is that junk genes are viruses inserted throughout the evolution of the mammalian genome that are missing a piece of biological machinery to be transcribed. These viruses are essentially stuck in our genome not helping or hurting us. But are these junk genes really just junk?

Humans share 99% of our DNA with mice. Humans and mice have 99% equivalent DNA. This is a staggeringly high amount for how different we are as organisms, but this just looks at what genes are shared serve the same purpose and not what genes are expressed. The junk genes in our system are now believed to play some role in the expression of genes through human evolution. Junk genes can be transposons, or genes that can hop around in our genome from one spot to another. Sometimes this jumping can turn on or off gene expression in cells. If it is a helpful change the cell can thrive and the organism will hopefully pass on the improved cells. If it is a detrimental jump the cell will probably die and stop the genetic flaw. The recent study done on this idea of jumping genes aided scientists in the explanation of evolution but more importantly has made a step forward in being able to differentiate stem cells down their different paths. 

Save a Horse Ride a T-Cell

When I was young I went horse back riding with my family. I was so excited to lead the horse around to all sorts of cool places, but shortly after I started riding I learned that this was not the case. The horse had walked the trail so many times that he knew exactly where the trail went and no matter how hard I tried I could not make the horse turn off on to a different trail. I was just along for the ride and no amount of effort would change the final destination. T cells behave in much the same way as these horses.

T-cells are an important part of our immune system. They are often referred to as the foot soldiers of immunology. Being the foot soldiers T cells know exactly where to go to reach any area in need an immunological response, such as wounds or cancerous tissue. So scientists have cleverly figured out if they can get a cancer killer attached to the T cell the killer can have a free safe ride straight to the cancer site. There it will hop off and start to kill cancerous cells. So in my analogy the T cell is the horse, I am the cancer killer just stuck along for the ride, and the stable at the end of our trail is the cancer. The horse will deliver me safe and sound to the stable no matter how much I fight to go somewhere else, just like the T cell will deliver the cancer killer right to the cancer wiping it out. Hooray, we beat cancer just by thinking about horses! Well there are still a few things to figure out, but being able to get the cancer killer to the site without detection and destruction by our own immune systems is a major step forward. The Mayo Clinic has successfully completed this process in mice with cancerous tumors using a type of retrovirus as the cancer killer. A retrovirus is just a type of virus that carries its genetic code as RNA instead of DNA. The virus inserts its RNA into the cell and forces it to make DNA from it and the DNA in turn will tell the cancerous cell to be self destructive. This whole process still needs to go though much more testing before it can even start trials on humans, but theoretically this looks very promising.  

Manbearpig is Real! At Least He Could Be

Al Gore was right! Manbearpig exists, or he very well could with all of the cross-species mixing going on in laboratories today. Manbearpig for those who don't know is a mythical creature from the show "South Park" who is half man, half bear, and half pig. The video below explains.

Zoologists have been interbreeding species for a long time. The first liger was bred in 1824 according to liger.org . Now scientists are crossing species separated a bit farther by evolution like a mouse and a human, a mouman if you will. South Koreans mixed together a mouse embryo with human stem cells and Americans unable to use fetal stem cells mixed specific tissues of a human with a mouse such as a mouse with human neurons. This research is not about what crazy chimeras we can make, it gives good insights into how stem cells differentiate. This can help scientists figure out how new ways stem cells can be used to repair tissues and cure diseases. It is all very important and highly ethically debated research, but I still wish they would make one manbearpig just for the fun of it. If you would like to know more here is a great article by the US News and World Report.