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The incredible Moon

admin — Sun, 10 Mar 2013 17:07:05 +0000

Ghazal Dear,

did you ever wondered why so many people are fascinated by the moon, which in fact has much less an impact on our physical life than the sun? Is it only its position close to the earth and the notion that the movement of the moon is completely depending on the existence of earth? Since unlike the sun, which is like a superpower that nurishes us with its energy but in fact could easily exist without the Earth, the moon is more like the Earth little sibling. Assuming the Earth would suddenly disappear, the moon would leave its orbit and escape into the endless space with a velocity of about 8800 km/h. The sun, however would not even recognise that the earth has disappeared.
It is perhaps this fascination that a large object as far as 380 thousand km away is still completely dependend on us that makes us feeling a some sort of almost intime relationship with the Moon.

Some people believe that the moon phases have a direct and immediate influence onto living organisms on Earth. But appart from the obvious change in night darkness between new and full moon, and the corresponding impact on sleep or nocturnal activity of creatures and people, there is very little solid scientific proof that human health or plant physiology changes with the moon cycle.
But it is not only myself who is amazed ones every month when the full moon rises above the horizon. Have a look at this short video sequence some astronomer did in New Zealand during January full moon. It is a real-time video shot at night with people observing the rising full moon (source: NASA Astronomers Picture of the Day).

It is most likely that the idea of the moon interfering with human physiology and health has its origin in the coincidental similarity of the period of femal oestrus cycle with the duration of the lunar cycle. But despite the apparent similarity between the 29.5 days lunar cycle period (or 27.3 days rotation period around the Earth) and the average 28.5 days of the femal oestrus cycle, there is no synchronity between these two oscillations.

But there was one observation that – for a short moment – made me wonder: Almost with the same frequency that I send to you images of the full moon every 28 days, you send back answers. It did not matter whether I send you just one or twenty e-mails per month: You always answered one per month, and this in very fixed intervalls. Therefore I was almost wondering if it is not so much your free will to write me occasionally, but more the result of a regular hormonal up and down that prompts you to reply to my letters.

Take Care
Michael

The Moon — one year later, but more than one year elder

admin — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 13:07:01 +0000

Ghazal my dear,

What is age, and what is aging, if everyone uses a different measure for this. This came to my mind when I did another picture of the moon tonight. Tonight it was once again the night of the Persides meteor shower. But since nothing could top the spectacular meteor that we saw together with you at the same night in 2010, I put more attention to the moon again (1). A year ago at the same night, we have been at the Bulgarian blacksea coast, and then the Persides night fell together with the full moon. This year, however, the same day in the year (11th to 12th of August), the moon looked completely different.

Its shape was already ascending to less than 25%, whereas full moon was already 10 days ago (exactly at August 2nd). So it is of some interest to understand why according to the solar calender exactly one year passed by (and even the Persides meteor showers declined to this (2), but the moon implies something different. As a proof, the picture on the left shows the shape of the moon as of tonight, and you can compare with the picture from a year ago.

The reason for this asynchrony is that the circular rotation of the moon around the earth and relative to the sun happens once every 29 days, 12h and ~4min. This means, that 12 month for the moon (or one year for it) take only 345 days, i.e. 11 days less than a normal year of 356 days. Therefore the full moon of August 2012 was visible 11 days earlier than the full moon of August 2011.

This means that for people who rely on the sun as their calender reference, a year has some 11 extra days, as compared to people who rely on the moon as a calender standard (like muslims). In the long term, after 33 solar years (which the western civilisation and the Persians use) an extra year has already accumulated for people in the islamic world. I have no clue if muslims indeed celebrate their birthdays according to the moons calender, and count one extra life year every 33 normal years. And it is not completely unlikely, that the processes of real biologically aging (or lets call it maturing) is influenced to some degree by the imagination of aging. Maybe somebody who really feels elder, if he or she suddenly discovers that instead of 33, he or she is already 34 years old. So therefore you might conclude (together with the early Beatles) that it is better to “….follow the sun”:

Sun is definitely good for a couple of physiological functions (vitamin D synthesis, production of serotonin which makes us happy and satisfied), but in higher doses it is doing the opposite: You know better than anybody else how UV-A and UV-B can accelerate the entire aging process, since you work on this issue and even got a scientific price for this. The Isar island, where some black ashes might still mark the site of our camp-fire, and which looked pretty uncosy and barely populated three weeks ago, today saw masses of locals who followed the sun and took advice from the 1960 Beatles song, rather than from your 2011 publication in Mutation Research.

I guess that now you’d like to know why I waited for an entire year, before sending you another photograph of the moon again. The reason was that after the Persides night in Bulgaria last year, my camera broke. I somehow smashed the display, and from then on it was totally black. But I did not want to throw it in the waste bin right away, since this camera was always a brave and reliable companion to us. So I left it untouched on my desk, before in a quiet moment three weeks ago I started to take it apart (like I did it with your wrist-watch two years ago). I soon realized that the broken display can be removed carefully and replaced with a new one. And soon I found through Ebay a possibility to get even seperate display units for virtually every single digital camera. I quickly located a provider with the funny name of GLOBAL-SHINING (3). Mr. or Mrs. Global Shining appeared to be a Mr. Ho, living with his GLOBAL STAR SHINING in Flat S30 1/F, Shopping Arcade, Tsuen Wan Centre, Tsuen Wan, Hongkong (4).

When I received Mr. Ho’s delivery, the small parcell contained not only the brand-new Samsung camery display, it also had as a little extra a special screw driver (not only fitting the microscopic steel screws that held together the camera back, but also of perfect size for chinese fingers) and a handwritten piece of paper saying “Thank you for considering GLOBAL SHINING as business partner”.

By help of the microscopic screw driver and some forceps from the lab I quickly managed to replace the camera display, and the pictures on todays post are the proof how well the whole camera is working again. Since I was so happy about revitalising the nice camera with the Mr. Ho’s help, I decided not only to give him excellent reference points on Ebay, but also send him some words of gratitude on a postcard showing Castle Neuschwanstein. It is nice to imagine how Mr. Ho mounts the colourful postcard to the wall of his Flat S30 1/F in the shopping arcade of Tsue Wan, Hongkong.

Is there a final take-home message from this post for you, Ghazal ? Maybe you will find one.

Take Care my Dear

Michael

Footnotes:

(1) Surely you know that the Moon symbolizes the pure, innocent beauty in Persian classicla poetry. This is independent of the exclusive role of the Sun in ancient, pre-islamic Persian culture, philosophy and science. But because poetry is very much influenced by arabic traditions, their spiritual preference for the moon as symbol in religion and arts got access into the poetry of Hafez, Rumi, Atta and Omar Khayyun.

(2) The Persides Meteor shower lives up to its name: same as the Persian people do, it follows precisely the sun’s calender. I guess that it follows in a precise and constant time after Persian Nouruz.

(3) Initially I could not figure out, if the name of the company GLOBAL-SHINING was referring to the moon or the sun. But now that I know that it is a Hongkong based company, I guess they even mean the Shining Stars.

(4) I guess Mr. Ho wont mind having his business address published here on my blog. But it might further promoted his excellent business. Just that Tsuen Wan does not have a postcode might discourage Hongkong tourists to drop into his store and buy camera displays.

The Velocity of Time (and how we experience it)

admin — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 08:11:26 +0000

Hi michael,

okay, so 4 institutes will go together and become the department of radiation research? which institutes are these?
the movie that you mentioned i have never seen before. Gustafsson is a very common name.
time pass to fast, unbelivable. just enjoying the free days that i have left. hope time goes slow!
hope you had a good weekend.

/ghazal

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Hi Ghazal my Dear,

So nice reading your mail. I just came in, we went out for a long walk because it was a beautiful Sunday, icecold but sunny. Finally, winter started here as well. This year it was a perfect program: We had almost later summer temperature till first half of November, and now, two weeks later, already winter climate. This intermediate autumn, with its wet and windy temperature lasted only two weeks.
I went swimming today in the little river next to our house (maybe you remember I wrote you in summer about it, it has several old stone bridges spanning over its cristal water). Swimming is still fine there, the water is warmer than the air (about 6 degrees I guess). After taking a bath for a minute, one gets very hot (think its like a counter-reaction of the body, like adaptive response).

The three institutes of the research-center that officially fused to form a Department are Radiation Biology, Radiation Protection, Cytogenetics and Medical Radiation Protection. I think the idea was more to save the institutes from beeing closed down, since there is actually not very much scientific exchange between the 4 institutes. Its merely political.

The center of Munich is very crowded nowadays. People start X-mas shopping, its crazy. I think people, although they are mostly catholics here, have forgotten that christmas has a non-comercial tradition. But I”m quite sure, you would also like it, to join millions of other people on their caravan through the department stores, don”t you ? What I like about the winter time in the city center is a big scating course they do on the Karlsplatz/Stachus (you might remember, where in summer-time there was the big fountain). This is really fun, one can do ice-scating, or just watch the other people doing it, or eat some grilled saussages.

I talked last week to Mrs. Friderike E-S, who studied UV-repair her whole life through. I asked her about the problem, if cells of different origin differ in their UV-repair capacity (depending on whether or not they can be exposed to sun-light at their normal position of the body). I told her that our hypothesis was that cells that origin from inside the body (lymphocytes, endothelial cells, neurons, muscle-cells and so on) might have a much lower UV-repair capacity than cells that are naturally sun-exposed (like skin fibroblasts or -melanocytes or epidermal or retinal cells).
She explained the following: There is no special DNA-repair system just for UV-induced damage. The nucleotide-excision and base-excision repair systems are essential to remove DNA damages induced by chemicals as well, like alkylating agents or free-radicals. And since these agents can cause DNA damage anywhere in the organism, most cells have the capacity to repair base-damages, 8-oxo-guanine, thymidine-dimers and all the other lesions, and therefore they are also prepared to repair these damages if they are induced by UVA-exposure in the laboratory.
I wrote some ideas about this on my blog, in case you want to read. Ghazal, I hope you don”t mind that I wrote it like a scientific dialogue, and it reads as if this fictional person “Ghazal” explains this. Hope you don”t hate that I put the words into the mouth of somebody else.

You wrote in your mail that you feel your time is passing very fast now, and you would like to slow it down a bit. I think it might depend from where you observe this. If you mean the present time, the moments you are just experience now: they seem to be short and run fast, if you are busy, if you have something important to do. Like when you did your thesis during the last weeks of September/October, I guess you felt that the few hours of the day passed away like minutes. But if you look back to such a busy period of your life, it seems as if this expanded, because you filled it up with something important. This for me is most obvious when travelling. If you finally arrive at your destinations in the evening, you just can not believe any more that 12 hours ago you still were at home. It seems as if this was many day ago. Do you know this feeling, Ghazal ? I guess so, because last year you also traveled a lot.
But this changes to the complete opposite, if one has nothing to do. Than the time one actually feels at the moment passes very slowly (for instance if you have to wait at the dentist or for a bus that does not arrive). It feels as if the minutes are hours. But later, if you look back, a period of your life where nothing important happened can appear very short.

I hope you are not fed up with all these long essays. You don”t have to answer them all, but I”m always very happy reading some words from you.

Take Care, Ghazal

PS: Yes, I would have been surprised if you would know this movie with Greta Garbo. I also saw it just by chance in the TV, because Leo Tolstoy, who wrote the novel, died 100 years ago. But if you just click on the youtube-link that shows a short scene from it, don”t you think its amazing, how Greta Garbo appeared trough the steam of train ?

Beach without you

admin — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 10:10:07 +0000

Hi Ghazal, my Dear,

I hope you are doing well and feel o.k.
Is it quiet now in the Lab ? Usually this is the best time to concentrate on the project. I hope so much that you find some intellectual satisfaction with the project and not have to consider it as a hard burden and a duty to fulfill.
I prepared some text about the mapping, the markers, the mouse strains and linkage. It should somehow fit into the thesis structure (as much as I remember it was part 2 or so). Just break it apart into the several sub-headings.

And of course, if you find in the text something difficult to understand or wrong or strange, please write me back. I very much like the intellectual conversation with you and I learn a lot from your questions as well.

I will also send you something that explains the animal experiments (the older ones we did years ago and the JF1 x FVB crosses). Was Prof. T. already around ?

I think of you and your aristocratic character, that is so much different from the people here around which are very loud and miss any sense of ellegance. This is usually what one can expect at a beach,but the kids like this and therefore I have to decline.
I”m waiting to see you next week.

Take Care,my dear

Michael

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Hi Michael!!

T. has not been here yet. I think he chose this week on purpose. Both
you and M. are on vacation.
It is a bit quiet yes. I put aside the labwork yesterday and today to
sit and read and write. btw, the sequencing worked!! im happy. me and
claudia will maybe analyse the data later today.
it is not a burden to do this project. everything has been good so far.

I do not know how to thank you for writing so much for me. i have
written a bit about the mapping and microsatellite and QTL. but it was
not as much as yours. so thank you. you should not do this on your
vacation. just go and have fun. right now i am concentrating at the
first part with chernobyl and thyroid cancer.

take care and see you next week!

/ghazal

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Ghazal my Dear,

Good to hear that you managed so well to continue with the project and the thesis during this week. Good luck with the sequence analysis,hope you and C. find some interesting variations between the two strains.
I attache a piece of text that describes the rational for using the JF1 and the FVB/N strain in this project. Please double-check if any of the chromosomal loci or gene names are consistent with what you wrote before. Also, in case you find any other discrepancies with the other text-pieces,please mark it in red and we will go through when I am back.

Ghazal, please don”t feel obliged to say “Thank you” for these small pieces of text. It is my very duty as a supervisor to help you with this. It is you who is doing the sophisticated and very decent experimental work day-by-day, without complaining that it is getting boring. Therefore,it is in fact me who must be extremely grateful. Don”t forget this, please.
And what is maybe even more relevant, that you always have this endless patience with me, if I come around and require that you spend the time after work with me. No MSc student has the commitment of going to the movies or to an exhibition or to the beach with its supervisor, or attend with him a concert or watch the meteor shower in the middle of the night. You could have in fact complaine with Prof. T. right from the beginning and ask for another project or another supervisor. I know I was always a bit violently when I asked you to meet me after work,and who knows how often I have disturbed your planing for the evening when you wanted to read or write something for the project. Therefore,it is the least I can do to help you to get everything together know for the thesis, it is a very small compensation for all the nice days and moments you have been with me and for having been always so patient and listened to my silly stories and telling me something from you. You could have easily send me to hell, you never did (I hope you dont wish you could have done this, but you did not wanted to risk your project).

Ghazal, you will see at the end (and everybody will agree) that a successful MSc project does not need this archetypical and hirarchical relation between student and supervisor, but it also can be done if there is a (sort of) frienship.
For me,to be honest, you are too much a mystery to call this a simple friendship.

I wish you a pleasant evening, a relaxing night, and nice dreams.

Michael

PS:How is your watch doing ? I hope that “No news are good news” and it runs precisely now, since you gave it a bit more freedom around your arm.

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hi michael,

i think i found one mutation on the third exon.

yes u are right i could ask prof. t. for another project (and he would not give me another since i already tried in the beginning). but i enjoy it here i would not do it. u could also be a bad supervisor and not wanting to help. so i am grateful.

i send u a text with some questions. answer just if u have time. no hurry.

my watch is suprisingly doing great!its strange.

have a good day!!
/ghazal
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Ghazal my Dear,

Congratulations for finding a sequence variation in FGF10 in one of the mouse strains..
You could check (using Ensembl and search for FGF10 in mouse,and click on the left panel on the button for variations) if this sequence alteration was already described in any other mouse strain. You should also check if it might cause an amino-acid change, in case it is still part of the coding sequence (I remember large parts of exon 3 were already 3″ UTR. Maybe you find something.
Before I left, I already ordered primers to test the FGF10 transcript and expression. Could you,please write a mail to O. and ask if and where she has stored the JF1 and FVB/N RNA or cDNA from thyroid (she extracted it as part of her MSc for the expression array).

Thanks for writing that you feel o.k. with how the project developed and that you are o.k. with everything and don”t regret that you came to Munich. You gave me the nicest and most exciting summer of my life, Ghazal. I never felt so much inspiration, excitement and satisfaction to share with somebody a project and many hours after work as with you.

Take Care

Michael

PS:I go through your text today and send you comments tomorrow

Quantum Entanglement, Dogs and the Problem of Longitude

admin — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 09:51:40 +0000

Hi Ghazal, my Dear,

Hope you didn” got lost on your Random Walk (swedish “Slump Promenade”) through the Olympia shopping mall.

The swedish “Slump” (for Randomness) is really a very, very strange word, isn”t it. And in research, randomness is always what we like to minimize because it tends to obscure our observations, which we would like so much to interprete as a result of shear causality. In the formular for the genetic LOD-score = log10 (Likelihood for Linkage by causative gene)/(Likelihood for Linkage by chance) it is the denominator standing below the fraction line.

Interesting, in the swedish Wikipedia-entry for Slump/Randomness there is a indirect link to a subject I already mentioned recently: Quantum Entanglement or Kvantmekanisk sammanflätning. This subject is still a hot issue between opponents and proponets of the quantum-mechanics. But there is good evidence that it works. The principle is as following: You take two particles that form a pair (having a joint wavefunction) and therefore are dependent from each other in their quantum-mechanical status. When you separate them spatially, their joint wavefunction remains and therefore their correlation is preserved. It is now believed, that by “taking on of these particles with you” wherever you go, and leave the other particle at home, you always can determine the status of the remote particle. A recent study published in NATURE estimated, that the speed by which information can be exchanged this way is about 10 000 times faster than speed of light.
My proposal, you remember, was to use our two twin DKNY watches for a permanent informational link between us, because their status I believe is already “entangled” .

A funny idea emerged in the 18th century, assuming an extra-sensual information transfer could solve the problem in sea navigations of how to keep the precise time from their home country (this was crucial to determine the longitude). There was the hilarious theory that if you take two dogs from the same litter (virtually twins), and you leave one of them at home and take the other one on board a ship that will go around the world, then the two dogs remain linked to each other by a transzendental and telepathic connection. Therefore, whenever the dog at home is hurt (for instance by peeking it with a needle), the other dog on-board the ship instantly feels the pain and howls loudely. So when the dog that is left home is hurt once a day at 12 o”clock midday, the people on board the ship hear the second dog howling and this way they know precisely when it is 12 o”clock at home. Funny idea, isn”t it.
Unfortunately (but maybe furtunately for the dogs) this project never worked ;-}, and finally the english carpenter and self-educated watchmaker John Harrison constructed in the year 1735 the first ship chronometer that run precise enough over many weeks on board the ship and therefore allowed the determination of the geographic longitude.
Although the strange idea to use dogs telepathic abilities for this purpose was born in England in the 18th century, it later appeared so hilarious that nowadays the english Wikipedia refers to it only in an entry on “Powder of Sympathy” rather than in its larger article on “The problem of Longitude“. The german, as always very open to strange and esoteric ideas, still reproduces this telepathic dog hypothesis in their Wikipedia.
But who knows, maybe today with the knowledge of quantum-mechanic entanglement we can make it work using our two watches.

Enjoy the time, my dear, don”t condemn me

Michael