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Category Archives: Physiology

Biomechanics & physiology tests by Portugal Rowing Team w/ K4b2 @ Porto Biomechanics Laboratory – Video

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Biomechanics physiology tests by Portugal Rowing Team w/ K4b2 @ Porto Biomechanics Laboratory
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Biomechanics & physiology tests by Portugal Rowing Team w/ K4b2 @ Porto Biomechanics Laboratory - Video

The American Physiological Society Launches APSselect

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Newswise The editorial team carefully selects the top articles published each month across all ten APS research journals that highlight, promote, and rapidly disseminate the best original research. This collection provides: Outstanding scientific discoveries published by APS each month. Timely, convenient, and concise "one-stop shopping" mechanism to broadly transmit the most exceptional work. Easy access from the APS homepage http://www.the-aps.org.

APSselect is an ideal mechanism to enable a broader mission: to promote excellence of the physiological discipline to biomedical researchers said the Editor-in-Chief Joseph Metzger in the January 2014 issue of The Physiologist.

APSselect aims to serve as a virtual front porch of the American Physiological Societys scholarly home. The overarching goal of APSselect is to shine a bright light on the outstanding scientific discoveries published by the Society. APSselect will serve the APS membership and the physiology discipline with distinction and pride. APSselect can be accessed at http://www.apsselect.physiology.org.

Physiology is the study of how molecules, cells, tissues, and organs function in health and disease. Established in 1887, the American Physiological Society (APS) was the first US society in the biomedical sciences field. The APS represents more than 11,000 members worldwide and publishes 14 peer-reviewed journals with a global readership. http://www.the-aps.org

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The American Physiological Society Launches APSselect

Vitamin C and E supplements hampers endurance training

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PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

2-Feb-2014

Contact: Lucy Holmes LHolmes@physoc.org 44-020-726-95727 Wiley

Vitamin C and E supplements may blunt the improvement of muscular endurance by disrupting cellular adaptions in exercised muscles suggests a new study published today [3 February] in The Journal of Physiology.

As vitamin C and E supplements are widely used, understanding if they interfere with cellular and physiological adaptations to exercise is of interest to people exercising for health purposes as well as to athletes.

Dr Gran Paulsen, who led the study at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, explains:

"Our results show that vitamin C and E supplements blunted the endurance training-induced increase of mitochondrial proteins, which are needed to improve muscular endurance."

In the 11-week trial, 54 young, healthy men and women were randomly allocated to receive either 1000mg vitamin C and 235mg vitamin E (consistent with amounts found in shop supplements), or a placebo (a pill containing no active ingredients). Neither the subjects nor the investigators knew which participant received the vitamins or placebos.

The participants completed an endurance training programme, consisting of three to four sessions per week, of primarily running. Fitness tests, blood samples and muscle biopsies were taken before and after the intervention.

Whilst the supplements did not affect maximal oxygen uptake or the results of a 20 metre shuttle test, the results showed that markers for the production of new muscle mitochondria the power supply for cells increased only in the group without supplements.

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Vitamin C and E supplements hampers endurance training

Weekly Vlog #13 (Meals, Core FURY, NASM and Physiology of Exercise Classes, Sleep Over with Lindsey) – Video

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Weekly Vlog #13 (Meals, Core FURY, NASM and Physiology of Exercise Classes, Sleep Over with Lindsey)
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Weekly Vlog #13 (Meals, Core FURY, NASM and Physiology of Exercise Classes, Sleep Over with Lindsey) - Video

What about IVF?

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The news last week that Robert Edwards won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his work on the in vitro fertilization of human eggs may have seemed a little surprising to some observers: IVF has become so mainstream that we hardly see it as an innovative technology anymore.

It has also stayed largely out of the headlines, with little of the moral controversy that surrounds other reproductive issues, such as abortion and embryonic stem cell research. Since its introduction, IVF has been widely embraced across the religious and political spectrum. This is particularly notable in the evangelical movement, whose leaders have kept abortion and stem cells on the political front burner, but have staked out a variety of compromise positions that allow them to accept this scientific form of family-building.

Behind IVF and embryonic stem cell research, however, lie the same sort of technology, the kind Edwards and his late colleague Dr. Patrick Steptoe developed. Both depend on embryos created in a lab by fertilizing an egg extracted from a woman. And both practices generally result in the destruction of embryos--in the case of stem cells, for research; in the case of IVF, as a common side effect of creating more embryos than a woman ultimately chooses to implant.

Should evangelical Christians accept IVF so easily? No, says Jennifer Lahl. The director of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network in San Francisco, Lahl has become a lone voice for a message that many of her fellow evangelicals are uncomfortable hearing: If embryos are human lives, she argues, then it is time for Christians to be consistent about their moral objections and unite against IVF.

For Lahl, the regular destruction or freezing of human embryos that occurs during the course of most IVF cycles amounts to ending human lives. And she suggests that the whole process is undermining human dignity. The minute the egg comes out of body, it is graded, the sperm is graded, then the embryo is graded, she says. In addition to determining which sperm and which eggs are most likely to produce a viable embryo, doctors often use a procedure called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to sort out which embryos may have defects. I see the whole enterprise as being highly eugenic, says Lahl.

To make her case, Lahl travels the country, testifying in favor of legislation that would restrict IVF, or at least regulate it more heavily. She speaks to religious groups and secular ones. And now she has put a part of her message on film. This week, Eggsploitation, a movie that Lahl produced to describe the medical dangers of egg donation, will be shown at Harvard Law School and Tufts University.

In her campaign against IVF, Lahl has found herself with little company among evangelicals. Despite her efforts, most of her coreligionists view IVF as acceptable for couples in need of a doctors help to start a family, even as they may fight to stop abortion or embryonic stem cell research. But beneath that broad consensus lies a wide range of often conflicting positions on how science should and shouldnt be allowed to affect conception.

Where evangelicals stand on IVF, and how much Lahl can influence them, matters not only because evangelicals possess plenty of political power when they do agree, but also because it shows how difficult it can be for a religious community to reach consensus on such complex bioethical issues at all.

It was 32 years ago that the first infertile couple conceived a baby with an egg and sperm in a test tube. Lesley Brown had tried for years to have a baby with her husband, John. Edwards and Steptoe, pioneers at the time in the emerging field of infertility medicine, found her fallopian tubes were blocked. In other words, while she could make eggs, her husbands sperm could not get to them. The doctors took eggs from Lesleys ovaries and fertilized them in a dish with Johns sperm; today their baby, Louise, is healthy and married and has had a child of her own. (The first American test-tube baby, Elizabeth Carr, today works for Boston.com and also recently had a baby of her own.)

The technology brought immediate worries: Scientists were concerned about severe birth defects; others were concerned that IVF children would have to live with a social stigma. Neither came to pass, and by scientific and social standards, the technology has grown into a smashing success. As of 2006, 3 million babies had been born worldwide using this technology.

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What about IVF?

Island Living Shapes Physiology and Lifestyle of Eastern Bluebirds

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Island plants and animals often differ from their mainland relatives. Why? In general, isolated islands lack top predators and large herbivores, which can influence food chains and traits of island organisms. In addition, differences in human interactions and threats posed by pathogens and parasites can also contribute to variances in traits.

In a case study involving eastern bluebirds, (Sialia sialis) researchers show just how island life shapes the physiology and life history of a species.

Eastern bluebirds are familiar to many people living in the eastern United States, and also to residents and tourists in Bermuda, an archipelago that lies in the North Atlantic Ocean about 1,100 km off the East Coast of the United States. Although the current outlook for the bluebirds in the U.S. is good, their Bermuda relatives have been designated as threatened and vulnerable.

In an effort to determine the differences of this species, researchers compared island (Bermuda) and continental (Ohio, U.S.) populations of the Eastern bluebird.

First, researchers investigated how nestlings and adults differed in growth, size and shape, immune function, numbers of eggs and nestlings that pairs produce, and how frequently parents deliver food to their young.

Researchers also attempted to identify differences between continental and island birds that might intensify the risks of decline typically associated with small and geographically isolated populations, such as the Bermuda bluebirds.

The study showed that bluebirds in Bermuda were lighter weight and had longer wings than the Ohio birds.

Also, while parents fed their nestlings at equal rates throughout the season in both locations, island nestlings grew slower and, as the breeding season progressed, more chicks died in their nests in Bermuda, though no similar seasonal pattern was observed in Ohio.

Overall, the results suggest that the Bermuda bluebirds may be adjusted to certain aspects of the island environment but not to others.

As a result, the study provides insight on how conservationists in Bermuda can manage declining bluebird populations. For example, by removing any mammalian or avian predators and competitors, or by managing human-driven changes in populations of insects (which the bluebirds feed on), both changes in survival and mortality rates and changes regarding physiology and reproduction of the species may occur.

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Island Living Shapes Physiology and Lifestyle of Eastern Bluebirds


  1. Physiology