Researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have discovered a molecular link between a high-fat diet and type 2 diabetes. The group of scientists from University of California, San Diego, together with their colleagues at Kirin Brewery Co. Ltd., and the University of Fukui (Japan), have showed that a high-fat diet disrupts genetic mechanisms behind insulin production:

In an article published in the December 29, 2005, issue of the journal Cell, the researchers report that knocking out a single gene encoding the enzyme GnT-4a glycosyltransferase (GnT-4a ) disrupts insulin production. Importantly, the scientists showed that a high-fat diet suppresses the activity of GnT-4a and leads to type 2 diabetes due to failure of the pancreatic beta cells.

The detailed explanation of the process is in the press release…

When it comes to mirrors and reflections, humans don’t fully understand them, as discovered by researchers from the University of Liverpool:

Dr Marco Bertamini, from the University’s School of Psychology, conducted a number of experiments by covering a mirror on a wall and inviting participants to walk along a line parallel to the mirror.
He asked them to guess the point at which they would be able to see their reflection. Results showed that people believe they can see themselves even before they are level with the near edge of the mirror.
Dr Bertamini said: “People tend not to understand that the location of the viewer matters in terms of what is visible in a mirror. A good example of this is what we call the Venus Effect which relates to the many famous paintings of the goddess Venus, looking in a small mirror.
“If you were to look at these paintings, you would assume that Venus is admiring her own face, because you see her face in the mirror. Your viewpoint, however, is rather different from hers; if you can see her in the mirror then she would see you in the mirror.”
Participants were also asked to estimate the image size of their head as it appears on the surface of the mirror. They estimated that it would be a similar size to their physical head. However, participants based their answer on the image they saw inside the mirror rather than on the image on the surface of it. They failed to recognise that the image on the surface of the mirror is half the size of the observer, because a mirror is always halfway between the observer and the image that appears inside the mirror.

Link…
The Venus effect images…

With the help of a modified atomic force microscope, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University have discovered how the scaffolding matrix of actin within our cells helps them to deal with physical obstacles, allowing cells to propagate, metastasize, and perform such functions as phagocytosis.
From the National Science Foundation website:

To track the growth rate and force generated by actin, the bioengineers modified an atomic force microscope (AFM).
In most research, the business end of an AFM is a miniscule, extremely sharp tip that is attached to a thin silicon-nitride cantilever. Because the tip is so slight, even features as tiny as individual atoms can cause the cantilever to deflect as it passes along, or slightly above, a surface. A laser bounces off the cantilever and into a detector, registering the tiny deflections and providing signals a computer translates into an image.
For this study, the researchers created a specialized AFM that uses two cantilevers and two lasers. Instead of scanning a surface, the cantilevers served as tiny springboards, one to bend as actin grew beneath it and the other to stay as a reference point close to the floor of the sample chamber. Using the two-cantilever system, the researchers pushed longer on the filaments than in any earlier study, and with more force — in some cases to the point where the filaments stalled and could grow no further.
In multiple experiments, the cantilevers applied an initial force to a slurry of growing actin filaments, then applied a larger force for as long as 30 minutes. They then returned to the original load, at every stage tracking how fast the network grew.
Each time, when the cantilever returned to its original load, the growth velocity of the actin was faster. When the fibers endured multiple load cycles, they grew at a rate that was dependent upon all of the cycles.
“We’ve found that the growth of actin is dependent on its loading history — not just on the load it feels at one moment, as we previously thought,” says Fletcher. “This means the structure of a cell has some ‘memory’ of its physical interactions.”
The researchers suspect the effect may relate to filament density, and the growth rate may be a function of the network architecture, itself dependent upon the entire load history.
“For a given load, proteins assume a certain network architecture,” says Fletcher. “This architecture then remodels under a new load. So, if you go back to the original load, the architecture is still tuned for a higher load, resulting in explosive growth.”

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