Please excuse my distraction and sporadicity

(See what I did there?)

Two jobs over the summer will kill work ethic pretty quickly, and so will 18 credits of classwork and 20 hours of work a week during the fall semester. As such, I apologize for the huge lapse in coverage, and I'm hoping for daily coverage starting Wednesday. Considering this resolution is not fitness-related, it shouldn't fail right off the bat.

Life in meatspace has been pretty busy. Like I said, I had a full-time IT job all summer, plus a night job at a local baseball stadium from June until I left in August. I also acquired two axolotls myself, Xochi and Chalchi, and while they're not the brightest crayons in the box, they're fun. Aside from that surprise batch of eggs the beginning of December, that is, but I sold most of them and kept a few to raise myself. I'll probably blog about their progress from time to time, as they're starting to hatch now. And I started two new jobs at school: one in the IT department doing more or less what I did over the summer, and one at a librarian at the other university in town. The latter replaced my position at the local science museum, which was a blast but had to be relinquished to let another student work there. There are some questionable views in the library's food, medical, and education sections (including a book on how vision problems are caused by shutting out emotional problems…) but overall it's enjoyable.

And with that, the bloggery resumes in two days :)

Close encounters of the rocky kind

Considering all of the apocalyptic "threats" that have occurred in the past few years, I'm surprised that none of the crackpots picked yesterday's asteroid passing to play on. The 1.7-mile asteroid, named QE2, was discovered in August 1998 by MIT's Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research program in Socorro, New Mexico. An asteroid of this size, should it hit Earth, would be catastrophic, but at its closest yesterday around 5pm Eastern time, it was still 15 times farther away than the moon, so there was no chance of it hitting us.

One of the neat things about this asteroid is that it is one of the few that have their own moons. A rock about 2,000 feet long orbits 1998 QE2, and in radar images, it appears brighter than the asteroid itself because it rotates a lot slower, which compresses the returning radar signal into only a small chunk of pixels, concentrating it into a bright patch in the image.

Despite NASA's decrease in funding, more asteroid-related programming is planned for the future, including a possible manned mission to lasso one for research, so stay tuned.

Science wonders and smiles with legs

I know this is old news, but I can't help but share this. I love these silly little animals.

I mean, look at them. They're smiles with legs.
Picture from Bing Images

For those of you not in the know, these are axolotls, Ambystoma mexicanum. They're a type of salamander that don't exactly mature, so they stay in their aquatic juvenile state; they mature sexually, otherwise there would be no baby axolotls, but they don't metamorphose into what we think of as salamanders.

Axolotls are highly endangered in their native lake around Mexico City, but they're popular as pets because of their adorableness and in the scientific community because of their regenerative properties. In the same way that lizards can regrow a tail that was chopped off, axolotls can regrow pretty much any part of their body, so long as their central nervous system isn't damaged too badly. That being said, scientists have been looking to these amphibians for clues toward possible treatments for tissue and injury repair in humans.

Researchers in Australia and the UK found that the axolotl's ability to regrow so much of its body without scarring is largely due to its immune system, specifically the presence of macrophages. As their name suggests, these cells engulf bacteria and other foreign matter. They also secrete molecules that help trigger the healing process by eliminating dead cells, then promoting blood vessel and cell growth. Mammals have macrophages as well, but ours don't emit those molecules until a few days after the injury, whereas the researchers found them in the axolotls one day after the injury; when the macrophages were taken out, the injury sites scarred up like ours would.

Knowing this, scientists may seek macrophage-based treatments for injuries to the nervous system or other tissues. Of course, this doesn't mean we can go chopping off limbs and then be able to grow back new ones at the drop of a hat, but it's certainly a start. You can read the full study here.

Welcome!

Welcome to Freshly Squeezed Science! This is the pilot for a blog about all sorts of interesting science topics.

Stay tuned for more info!