A Neural Network Invents Some Pies

To help me refer my chemistry resources to students who seek help, I made a list of all the chemistry master posts I created in the past. Please enjoy and don’t forget to message me if any other chemistry questions arise or if you found anything in this post helpful!

General Chemistry 101 // Contains helpful websites, practice tests, study guides, and tips.

Steps to Balancing Chemical Equations // A 10 step guide to solving unbalanced chemical equations. Practice problems are provided at the end!

Ideal Gas Laws // A little introduction to the history of ideal gas laws and a breakdown of each equation. Also, it contains resources to learn more about them, practice problems, and a personal tip on how I tackle problems!

Electrochemistry Q // I got asked about galvanic cells. With my best attempt, I answered with basic definitions and posted some good websites! However, my knowledge grew about this topic so ask any further questions in my ask.

How I Survived Organic Chemistry // I provide tips on how to study and prepare for organic chemistry.

Organic Chemistry Synthesis Q // My old organic chemistry professor gave us amazing roadmaps of the syntheses we learned in organic chemistry I (Alcohol, alkyne, alkene, epoxide).

Emil Fisher // A short history post about Emil Fisher and his work with fisher projections. Linked are some practice problems on fisher projections which are my favorite!!

NMR // Another short history post but about nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Like before, practice problems are linked in the description!

A Master Post of Chemistry Resources // My favorite master post of all time. It contains websites with information and practice problems for every subject in chemistry.

How To: Pass and Prepare for A Chemistry Exam // Chemistry exams can be pretty stressful but they don’t have to be! :-)

Tips for Organization // I talk about how to organize your chemistry notes and binders. 

Pursuing A Chemistry Degree Q // Just a little something for students who want to major in chemistry but don’t know if they should do a B.A. or B.S. (Valid for the USA, not sure if other countries do the B.A./B.S. system).

Hopefully, I’ll be updating this with more resources in the future! Don’t forget to check out my “Dummies Guide to Physics”! Another good master post that isn’t related to chemistry.

- TheChemistryNerd

Jupiter’s south pole, taken by Cassini

Perfect magnets

Reblog if you ARE a woman in STEM, SUPPORT women in STEM, or ARE STILL BITTER about Rosalind Franklin not getting credit for discovering the structure of DNA and the Nobel prize going to Watson and Crick instead.

If Earth had Saturn’s Rings

From an excellent post by Jason Davis

From Washington, D.C., the rings would only fill a portion of the sky, but appear striking nonetheless. Here, we see them at sunrise.

From Guatemala, only 14 degrees above the equator, the rings would begin to stretch across the horizon. Their reflected light would make the moon much brighter.

From Earth’s equator, Saturn’s rings would be viewed edge-on, appearing as a thin, bright line bisecting the sky.

At the March and September equinoxes, the Sun would be positioned directly over the rings, casting a dramatic shadow at the equator.

At midnight at the Tropic of Capricorn, which sits at 23 degrees south latitude, the Earth casts a shadow over the middle of the rings, while the outer portions remain lit.

via x

Better late than never!

Here’s a comic about Cosmic Strings!

https://www.space.com/9315-cracks-universe-physicists-search-cosmic-strings.html

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080120182315.htm

Why we need GMOs to survive climate change

Genetically modified organisms get a bad rap for many reasons, but we’ve actually been genetically altering what we eat since the dawn of human history.

“For 10,000 years, we have altered the genetic makeup of our crops,”explains UC Davis plant pathology professor Pamela Ronald.

“Today virtually everything we eat is produced from seeds that we have genetically altered in one way or another.” (You can read more about Ronald’s thoughts on genetically engineered food here.)

Right now her focus is on rice. It’s one of our basic crops and without it, we would struggle to feed much of the world.

With climate change, we’re seeing an increase in flooding in places like India and Bangladesh, which makes it harder to grow this important food staple.

So Ronald and her lab have developed a flood-tolerant strain of rice. It’s known as Sub1a or “scuba rice” and millions of farmers in South Asia are now growing it in their fields. 

Today is National Food Day, a day dedicated to hunger awareness. But as we focus on food insecurity, we need to talk more about how global warming will make the problem worse.

As our climate continues to heat up, it has huge impacts on what foods we are able to grow. Will our crops be able to survive droughts and floods? The University of California leads six labs that are working to develop other climate-resilient crops including chickpea, cowpea and millet.

Find out what other scientists are doing to improve our food.

(Image caption: In this illustration, a pair of eyeglasses “resolves” distinct serotonin neuron subtypes (shown as brightly colored cells) on a simple map of a region called the raphe in the mouse brain. By viewing serotonin neurons through multiple “lenses”—such as single-neuron and population-scale global gene expression, developmental lineage and anatomy—researchers have revealed diverse subtypes and principles of subtype organization in the brain. Credit: Mallory Rice)

Time for a New Definition

It used to be enough to call a serotonergic neuron a serotonergic neuron.

These brain cells make the neurotransmitter serotonin, which helps regulate mood, appetite, breathing rate, body temperature and more.

Recently, however, scientists have begun to learn that these neurons differ from one another—and that the differences likely matter in dysfunction and disease.

Last year, a team led by Harvard Medical School genetics professor Susan Dymecki defined a subgroup of serotonergic neurons in mice by showing that those cells specifically, among all serotonergic neurons, were responsible for increasing the breathing rate when too much carbon dioxide builds up in the body.

Now, Dymecki and colleagues have taken a first stab at systematically characterizing serotonergic neurons at the molecular level and defining a full set of subtypes, again in mice.

The researchers report in Neuron that serotonergic neurons come in at least six major molecular subtypes defined by distinct expression patterns of hundreds of genes. In many cases, the subtypes modulate different behaviors in the body.

By conducting a cross-disciplinary series of experiments, the researchers found that the subtypes also vary in their developmental lineage, anatomical distribution, combinations of receptors on the cell surface and electrical firing properties.

“This work reveals how diverse serotonin neurons are at the molecular level, which may help to explain how, collectively, they are able to perform so many distinct functions,” said Benjamin Okaty, a postdoctoral researcher in the Dymecki lab and co-first author of the paper.

“To have the list of molecular players that make each of these subtypes different from one another gives us an important handle on learning more about what that cell type does and how we can manipulate only that subtype,” said Dymecki. “It holds enormous therapeutic potential.”

“This is an ancient neurotransmitter system that’s implicated in many different diseases, and it’s starting to be cracked open,” said Morgan Freret, a graduate student in the Dymecki lab and co-first author of the paper. “We can now ask questions in a more systematic way about which serotonergic cells and molecules are important in, for example, pain, sleep apnea or anxiety.”

Crucially, the team also showed that a serotonergic neuron’s gene expression and function depend not only on its location in the adult brain stem, but also on its cellular ancestor in the developing brain.

“Earlier work had shown that you could explore the relationship between a mature neuronal system and the different developmental lineages that gave rise to it, but we had no idea whether it was meaningful,” said Dymecki. “We show that the molecular phenotypes of these neurons track quite tightly to their developmental origin, with anatomy making some interesting contributions as well.”

While the work was done in mice, Dymecki is optimistic that it will be replicated in humans because the serotonergic neuronal system is in a highly conserved region of the brain, meaning it tends to remain consistent across vertebrate species.

Because of this, researchers can look for the same molecular signatures in human tissue and begin to tease apart whether particular subtypes of serotonergic neurons are involved in conditions such as sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) or autism.

Such research could ultimately reveal previously unknown contributions of the serotonergic neuronal system to disease, inform the development of biomarkers or lead to more targeted therapies.

The team’s findings could also inform stem cell research. “Which subtype of serotonergic neuron are we getting when we use current stem cell protocols?” asked Dymecki. “Can we drive the development of different subtypes? Can we watch how gene expression patterns change over time during development for each subtype?”

Finally, the study provides an example of a highly integrative approach to understanding brain function at multiple scales, “linking genes and gene networks to the properties of single neurons and populations of neuron subtypes, all the way up to the level of animal behaviors,” said Okaty. “I think it’s a useful template going forward. Imagine what we’d learn by applying this approach to all the neurotransmitter systems in the brain.”