haircut and a cortisol stress test

I read about this new stress test where they can take a sample of your hair and assess how much stress you've been under for the last 6 months. How cool is this? Since I am due for a haircut, maybe I can send a hair sample to the lab and figure out how much stress I've been under during the last semester.

Cortisol is a steroid hormone produced by the adrenal gland and can be tested with a blood, saliva or urine sample. It is released in response to stress, suppresses the immune system and increases the blood glucose level. Caffeine, lack of sleep, trauma can increase cortisol levels, and laughing(!), tea, and massage/music therapy can lower cortisol levels. Previous methods of cortisol tests can only assess cortisol levels secreted during the last hours/day, but this new method of cortisol hair tests can reveal stress levels over a longer period of time, six months and possibly more. Researchers at the University of Western Ontario measured cortisol levels from the hair of heart attack patients from an Israeli hospital and compared it to cortisol levels from that of non-hear attack patients from the same hospital. Over the past few years, hair cortisol has been found in additional studies to be a useful marker of how much stress/pain the individual is under, rather than using individual self-assessments of stress, which are not as reliable. See links here, here, and here.

Happy Monday! Back in home, sweet home after a long relaxing vacation looking at the sea. If I could swim 90 miles I would be in Cuba...

cruisin to t-town.

Finals are o-v-e-r, and I'm heading back to Tampa. It's been a long, dragging finals period but I am so glad to be done! I packed light this time, so hopefully I can survive in Tampa, which has been getting somewhat of a freak weather lately (40F? In Florida? I've gone swimming on the beach on New Year's Day before!).

Seriously, this is the least I've packed for any break ever. 
The $25 per baggage is a good incentive for me to pack less.

Here's some last leaving shots of our beautiful campus:

In front of the Sallyport

 The Academic Quad and Fondren Library in the back, through the arch

 It's so windy outside! In the quad.

Between Brochstein Pavilion and the library, where the leaves are actually yellow. Doesn't this place look so zen? I should use it more often instead of sitting inside the library.

Fountain at the Baker Institute with the Jones Business School in the back.

My flight leaves this afternoon, and I'm spending the last few hours in Houston watching Nikita (I am seriously addicted!!!!). It's been a great semester and I got to take some amazing courses with incredible professors. I got to learn in great detail about topics that intrigued me and thoroughly enjoyed living in a suite with my favorite girls. We bonded over cockroaches (screaming about cockroaches found in bathrooms, drawers, and coffee machines, shopping for Raid, and thinking about hiring cockroach-exterminators). Oh, and the promiscuous tyrosine kinase was on my immunology final!

promiscuous tyrosine kinase

Last day of immunology, and Dr. N. didn't fail to leave us with a lasting impression.

From Kuby's immunology

Discussing cancer and chronic myelogenous leukemia, Dr. N. mentioned that the fusion protein produced by the "Philadelphia" chromosome  goes around and becomes a constitutively active tyrosine kinase. She proclaimed it a "promiscuous" tyrosine kinase, a "slutty" protein which "turns on" all these other proteins. 

Everyone laughed for a good while. I love it when neutral/biological objects are described with human-verbs and adjectives: "helps", "wants", "recruits" are common ones that come to mind! 

part of a pack: herd immunity.

Interestingly, the first time I heard about the concept of herd immunity was in Game Theory. We discussed a scenario where for each person, getting vaccinated meant a certain risk: mathematical probability of getting sick/dying from the vaccine, and your chance of getting the disease depended on how many people got the vaccine. I thought the idea was fascinating- so you can risk whether you want to get the vaccine or not, which although it carries a certain danger, and if you get the vaccine, you are probably going to be a-ok. On the other hand, even if you were lazy/scared and didn't get the vaccine, but enough people around you had gotten the vaccine, you might be protected.

Since no vaccine is 100% effective, some individuals in a population, even if they are vaccinated, may not be protected against the pathogen. Or they may not be vaccinated, period. However, if enough people are vaccinated in the population, the pathogen can't find a host, and won't get around to infecting those who are even susceptible! This is called herd immunity. Neat, right?

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

It means that a population doesn't have to be 100% vaccinated in order to eradicate a disease. However, we like to leave those unvaccinated percentages for those who are immune compromised or have otherwise similar conditions that would make vaccination unwise.

caryophanon latum 318.

This is what I've been spending my last 7 weeks working on, in the smelly lab for my microbiology class.

Our assignment was to each identify a different bacteria from a water sample our professor collected around Houston & finally:

 Note the pale-yellow, glistening surface.

 Older colonies grow a deeper orange... and,

Gram-positive, motile on the wet mounts, multicellular & straight to slightly curved.

Caryophanon latum. Found in cow dung in 1940 by Pershkoff! Thank you, Bergey's. We did motility mounts, grew them in 36 degrees, 30 degrees, and room temperature, ran catalase/oxidase tests, Gram-stained, Methyl-red/VP tested... and here it is, finally identified and named. For our final paper we need to write a mini monograph about the species & I'm done done done!

This semester is almost over. Also meaning, finals period is coming close. This week it's been impossible to find a desk in the library!