Archive for the ‘Female Genetics’ Category

The Women's Breast Health and Imaging Center at Aiken Regional Medical Centers upgraded their equipment this year with the addition of new 3D mammography units. The technology plays a crucial role in the early detection of breast cancer.

Unlike 2D mammograms, which take four photos, the new 3D mammogram technology is capable of taking 300 photos within four seconds and penetrating dense tissue, according to Dr. Jill Enter, a general surgeon with Aiken Surgical Associates.

"It makes a compact disc selection of 300 images of the breast, so it allows the radiologist to scroll through that dense breast tissue better and it decreases the amount of false positives that we have," Enter said. "It also allows for earlier detection of breast cancer."

The Women's Breast Health and Imaging Center obtained its first 3D mammography unit in March 2019. Three other units were obtained in July.

Enter, who previously worked at Aiken Regional and returned recently after working for the Doctor's Hospital of August for five years, said she frequently does breast cancer surgeries, as most of her female patients seem to prefer a female doctor in the area of breast health.

She said that, even with the constant improvements in medical technology, patient education and awareness of the disease is key in the battle against breast cancer.

"It's always changing," Enter said. "Even in the last 10 years since I've been in private practice, it has dramatically turned on its head."

Enter said women need to do self-exams more frequently, as breast cancer normally presents as a small lump in the breast. She said women at risk for the disease also need to pay more attention to their family history especially on their father's side.

"Fifty percent of your genetics comes from your dad's side, too," Enter said. "Breast cancer is not just a female-oriented thing."

She also said regular mammograms are extremely important, and patients with a family history of breast cancer should begin screenings several years before the age of 40, when most patients are scheduled for their first mammogram.

"Don't not have a screening because you don't have insurance," Enter said. "Don't ignore it."

For those without insurance, some grants can be provided for those who qualify to help offset the cost of breast cancer screenings. Best Chance Network, which is based in Columbia, is one such organization.

For more info about the Women's Breast Health and Imaging Center, visit aikenregional.com.

Kristina Rackley is a general assignment reporter with the Aiken Standard.

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New 3D mammogram technology crucial in early detection of breast cancer - Aiken Standard

It was a disastrous blow to ranchers both in loss of livestock, genetics and cattle they had been raising for generations, as well as a huge financial loss.

I was in the Black Hills speaking at an agricultural event with South Dakota ranching women attendees. My plan was to drive to my next speaking event in western North Dakota. But instead, I was stranded at a lodge, without electricity, with 30 or so female ranchers and women in agriculture (and a few husbands) plus a national tour group waiting to see Mount Rushmore.

Every early fall I think of the storm, a couple of days of no electricity, no heat other than the fireplace in the main lobby of the lodge and lodge staff preparing food for guests on the one gas stove in the lodge, using ingredients and meat from what was supposed to be prepared into a feast for a weekend outdoor wedding. Instead, it fed those of us stranded.

There were no generators or snow blowers and all roads and our vehicles were covered in 38 inches of snow. We had two shovels and worked together when the snow stopped. We flagged down a road crew to help.

The messy memories arent what I recall annually though.

Its the people who made the difference in Storm Atlas. The ranchers who sat around, unable to leave, but trying to get ahold of their families at home to check on their livestock.

The losses would be deep for these families I knew. You could expect them to be bitter at the circumstances they had no control over, and instead, they chose to be better.

As we sat in front of the fire at the lodge, the group of ranch and farm women planned outreach and fundraising to help those in agriculture who would need a hand up in the months to recover from Storm Atlas.

They didnt grab headlines but raised awareness and aid that positively impacted others in need. Ranching women chose to better together.

At the same time, I remember a tour group attendee demanding she get a ride to the airport and saying she was leaving South Dakota. The staff tried to explain there were no flights and absolutely no way to get her out of the closed highways of the Black Hills. The woman couldnt change her circumstances and bitterly expressed her frustration.

Here we are, in another set of devastating circumstances for many in agriculture in our region. Its not from one storm event but most likely the wettest early fall on record.

Water fills our farm fields and the anticipation for harvest fades for some as worry or anxiety sets in. Its been a limited growing season with numerous setbacks.

We cannot control the weather. We can care for one another. We can choose to support one another through communication and awareness, and create a path that gives others an outlet to show support. You do not have to be in a specific industry or be an expert in anything to support and encourage those struggling in a season of difficulty.

Communicate about the setbacks your region is faced with, not just grumbling over coffee with your family or the neighbors, but with your elected officials, online and offline.

Reach out to the media (thats us) with a unique experience or story your farm or community has never experienced before this season.

Check-in on your farming friends and neighbors. Help plan or volunteer at a community event. Youre not alone in difficult times. Choose to be better from a time that could make us bitter. There will be more storms, blizzards, droughts and then too much rain in our lives. We cannot control the rain, the sunshine or frost date.

We can be better through outreach to one another and communication to make sure agricultures story is shared with those nearby and far from our fields.

See the rest here:
The Pinke Post: When we could be bitter, choose to be better - The Daily Republic

Kristin Hull is Founder, CEO, and CIO of Nia Impact Capita

If you look 208 years into the futureaccording to the worlds top economistsyoull see a far more healthy, secure, and productive world fueled by gender equality. Though its not very encouraging to those of us living in a culture of entrenched bias, we owe it to future generations to move toward fairness and inclusiveness anyway. The fact is, harnessing the talent we need to compete in the 21st and 22nd century means elevating women and girls today. International Day of The Girl (Friday, October 11th) is a reminder that we need to play the long game. We all have to do our part to accelerate progress for our girls, their girls, and their girls even if the benefits of a more fair and open society will not be our own to enjoy.

These trailblazing female CEOs are humble about their formative years, frank about the daunting challenges they encountered, and relentlessly encouraging.

We need girls to believe that they belong at the table, says Diana Kapp, that they deserve to make money and have power. Kapps new book, Girls Who Run the World: 31 CEOs Who Mean Business, tells the origin stories of female leaders who are disrupting an array of industries from construction to personal genetics, biotech to green energy. Consider that the unstoppable Jessica Matthews of Uncharted Power, Tina Sharkey of Brandless, Kara Goldin of Hint, and Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe were all once just ordinary girls who set out on stratospheric climbs with no guides, no manuals, and no maps. Like a World Book Encyclopedia of feminine role models, Kapp's trailblazing CEOs are humble about their formative years, frank about the daunting challenges they encountered, and relentlessly encouraging.

After tracking these womens trajectories from childhood dreamers to game-changing leaders, Kapp noticed they all shared a similar characteristic. These women have cajones, she says. They embrace imperfection and experimentation, are determined to figure things out on their own, and are willing to move forward without knowing many of the answers.

Female CEOs featured in Girls Who Run The World by Diana Kapp

The book connects the reader to the girl inside each of these innovators, granting a friendly and intimate access meant to inspire and ignite the ambitions of young women. Each story illustrates how passion and conviction for new ideas drive purpose, why a tough skin is critical, how to withstand the inevitable doubters, and how to be nimble and pivot when necessary. Most important is the willingness to "fail and flail" because inevitably, things go wrong, often. The message for the next generation is that these girls did it, and you can too. And that even in the face of failure, its still worth it to strike out boldly on your own.

In the spirit of International Day of The Girl, lets send our girls a message of inspiration and support. Attitudes are only going to change when this generation, the next generation, and every generation of girls after refuse to believe they deserve anything less.So what would you say to yourself as a young girl? and share your message with girls everywhere tomorrow, October 11th.

Here's a gallery of women CEOs who have plenty of great ideas for young women.

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Notes To Myself As A Girl: Female CEOs Tell Girls What They Need To Hear Most - Forbes

The trypanosomatid parasite Crithidia mellificae infects managed honeybees, but could it also affect wild bees? A recent article investigates.

Cara Macfarlane 11 Oct 2019

Source: Strobl et al, 2019

Several regions of the world have reported adecline in wild bee species. A contributing factor may be pathogen spillover from managed honeybees, and a variety of pathogens so far exclusively linked to honeybees have been detected in several wild bee species.

However, the detection of a pathogen does not necessarily mean the infection is spreading per se. Pathogens may behave differently within a novel host, where a species may not serve as a suitable host or the parasite does not replicate. Disease progression and symptom intensity can also differ both between and within species.

Several factors influence host susceptibility to pathogens and infection, such as life history traits (e.g. reproductive strategies and sociality), environmental traits, nutrition and the genetics of the host and pathogen. For example, greater infection resistance is typically observed in hosts with genetic heterozygosity and in social groups with higher genetic diversity. The haploid susceptibility hypothesis predicts in Hymenoptera the haploid males from unfertilized eggs should have higher susceptibility (compared to diploid females) as they lack heterozygosity.

Trypanosomatids are unicellular eukaryotic flagellate parasites, and some species colonize the hindgut of bees. They damage intestinal cells through formation of hemidesmosomes, and these lesions can reduce host health at the individual and colony level. In bumblebees, parasite cells multiply after oral ingestion and are transmitted to novel bumblebee hosts via fecal-oral transmission.

The trypanosomatid parasite Crithidia mellificae infects honeybees. While little is known about the effects of infection, there are positive correlations between C. mellificae infection levels and honeybee colony winter mortality. Two common solitary bee species, Osmia cornuta and Osmia bicornis have also recently been suggested as novel hosts of C. mellificae.

In a recent paper, Strobl and colleagues tested whether this parasite could infect a solitary bee by challenging male and female O. cornuta with C. mellificae. The authors also employed honeybee workers as positive controls to assess infection parameters in a known host. Bee body mass, survival and pathogen infection levels were evaluated as measures of susceptibility.

O. cornuta were randomly allocated to treatment (exposed to C. mellificae cells) or uninfected controls, and the males and females separated (control: n = 2 cages, C. mellificae exposure: n = 4 cages). Honeybee workers were randomly allocated to eight cages (control: n = 3, C. mellificae exposure: n = 5), and all cages were maintained for 19 days.

Each cage was provided with a C. mellificae-infected sucrose solution or with sucrose (controls). Survival was recorded every 24 hours and dead individuals were removed. Bees were investigated for living C. mellificae cells before inoculation with C. mellificae (day 0) and on days 6, 10, 15 and 19 post inoculation (p.i.). Bees were individually weighed to assess body mass and anesthetized with CO2, before quantifying C. mellificae cells. DNA sampled on day 0, 15 and 19 was analyzed by PCR and parasite loads were quantified by qPCR.

C. mellificae cell counts on specific days preinfection and p.i. (A) In honeybees (A. mellifera), C. mellificae cell counts significantly increased over time p.i. (B) In O. cornuta females (), C. mellificae cell counts did not significantly change over time p.i. (C) C. mellificae cell counts did not significantly change in O. cornuta males ().

In all groups of bees, body mass did not significantly change over time p.i. (all P> 0.05) or differ between control and C. mellificaeexposed individuals.

After 19 days p.i., 75.5% of the 83 control honeybees and 63.2% of the 128 C. mellificae-exposed honeybees were alive, with significantly reduced survival in parasite-exposed individuals. Of the 80 honeybees sampled for C. mellificae counting, 32.5% of the bees were infected. Parasite cell counts increased 6.6 fold in infected honeybees between days 6 and 19 p.i. and significantly reduced survival.

C. mellificae exposure did not significantly affect survival of O. cornuta females. Of the 25 control O. cornuta females 80.7% survived compared to 68.1% of the 56 C. mellificae-exposed females. However, male O. cornuta had the lowest survival of all bee groups. After 19 days p.i., 39% of the 43 controls and none of the 81 C. mellificae-exposed male bees were alive. Of the 41 O. cornuta females sampled over the entire p.i period, 68.3% showed C. mellificae cells, whereas 90% of the 30 males sampled showed parasite cell counts.

In O. cornuta bees, C. mellificae numbers increased 23.6 fold within cages but did not significantly change between days 6 and 19 p.i. in individual females or males. In both female and male O. cornuta, the proportion of infected individuals increased over time p.i.

A significant positive correlation between C. mellificae cell counts and C. mellificae genomic equivalent copies per bee was also observed in all groups of bees.

Proportion of infected individuals on specific days p.i. The proportion of infected honey bee (A. mellifera) workers, O. cornuta females () and O. cornuta males () are shown on days 6, 10, 15 and 19 p.i.

Strobl and colleagues demonstrate that the solitary wild bee O. cornuta can host the honeybee parasite C. mellificae, and that males are more susceptible. The proportion of infected hosts also increased in O. cornuta cages with feces, but not in honeybee cages without feces. This indicates a fecal-oral transmission route for C. mellificae, as with Crithidia species infecting bumblebees.

The reduced survival of infected honeybee workers provides some causal evidence for the correlation between overwintering colony mortality and C. mellificae infection levels. With evidence of a negative effect on managed honeybee species and male wild solitary bee species, field studies are required to evaluate spillover potential from managed to wild bees and vice versa.

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Trypanosomatid parasites in bees... taking a walk on the wild side? - BugBitten - BMC Blogs Network

In light of the announcement of the 2019 Nobel Laureates, we highlighted 3 of the 50 Cornell faculty and alumni, past and present, who have been awarded Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry and Physiology and Medicine.

Hoffmann

Prof. Roald Hoffmann, chemistry, is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, Emeritus and has been part of the Cornell faculty since 1965. Hoffmann has researched a variety of sub-fields within chemistry, including organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry and solid state chemistry.

Hoffmann shared the Nobel Prize with Kenichi Fukui in 1981 for their theories, developed independently, concerning the course of chemical reactions. However, Hoffmann relatedmixed feelings regarding the Nobel Prize: pleasure at the recognition, but alsosadness that his colleague R.B. Woodward did not live to receive it with him. He also described the jealousy of peers and the pressure of being watched in the future.

If everyone around you asks you what are going to do next, you begin to think about that and that inhibits creativity, Hoffman said.

However, winning the Nobel Prize didnt change his focus on research and teaching, including teaching undergraduates.

I remained a scientist and I remained teaching Introduction to Chemistry, though I havent done it for 10 years now because Im retired, Hoffman said.

Hoffmann has also been heavily involved in the humanities throughout his life, writing plays, books and poetry. Hoffmann has always believed strongly in the importance of communicating science to the public, saying that scientists should take every opportunity to speak to the general public.

When asked what advice he had for students interested in a future in research, Hoffmann suggested getting research experience in college.

The research experience allows you to move from very large classes [] to the research group and the research group meetings which are usually smaller and which are more of a scientific family, Hoffman said.

Varmus

While many scientists began their careers with a deep passion for science, Dr. Varmus story was more complex. Varmus went through high school hating science.

[I] grew up in pleasant circumstances on Long Island where my major interests in life were tennis and fiction, not science. Science teachers were pretty appalling, Varmus said in a lecture on May 2nd.

While Varmus started as a physician, his career changed course because of his work as a commissioned officer in the Public Health Service of the NIH.

That experience at NIH, my first serious exposure to laboratory life and at the advanced age of 28, determined the course of my career, Varmus wrote in an email to The Sun.

After Dr. Varmus won the 1989 Nobel Prize for his research partnership with J. Michael Bishop studying oncogenesis [becoming cancerous] in retroviruses, Varmus pursued leadership opportunities in addition to research.

I took advantage of my new public platform to get engaged in the leadership of institutions that I admire, hoping to make changes that I thought were important, Varmus said.

Despite his numerous leadership positions, including seven years as the director of the NIH, 10 years as President of Memorial Sloan Kettering and five years as the director of the National Cancer Institute, Varmus continued his research.

Varmus is now the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical School, and is studying the molecular mechanisms of oncogenesis.

McClintock

Barbara McClintock M.S. 25, PhD 27, was a pioneering researcher in cytogenetics, the study of the structure of DNA within a cell nucleus. Her discoveries transformed the field of genetics, and while she passed away in 1992, her memory lives on.

McClintock studied the chromosome structure inside maize cells, and discovered what were later called jumping genes, or components that moved between chromosomes. Decades passed before her work was recognized, because her research did not align with conventional wisdom in science before the discovery of DNA.

Previously, people thought that each chromosome is a unique structure/entity, containing its own genetic materials, Prof. Jun Kelly Liu, molecular biology and genetics, wrote in an email. This is also the reason why it took people many years to accept the mobile genetic element concept that she proposed.

After other scientists confirmed her theories, McClintock won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for the discovery that she made many decades earlier, making her the only Cornell-affiliated woman to date to win a Nobel Prize in science. While a she was a Cornell alumna, McClintock did not become a Cornell faculty member because the university refused to hire a female professor.

Liu reflected on the mixed Cornells mixed legacy related to McClintock in an email with the Sun: Its really inspiring to have a woman scientist win the Nobel Prize. She didnt get hired as a professor at Cornell even with all her groundbreaking work, all because she was a woman.

While other women have since won the Nobel prize in physiology and medicine, chemistry and physics, women remain underrepresented among science laureates. Liu has some suggestions for addressing this concern.

We need more women to be in faculty positions so that they can serve as role models to students who are considering a career in the sciences, Liu said.

Anil Oza 22 contributed to reporting in this article.

Excerpt from:
A Look at Past Cornell-Affiliated Nobel Prize Laureates: How their Legacy will Inspire Generations of Scientists to Come - Cornell University The...

Express News Service

BENGALURU:Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in Indian women and accounts for 27 per cent of all cancers in women. About 1 in 28 women are likely to develop breast cancer during their lifetime. In the urban areas the incidence is 1 in 22 as compared to the rural areas where 1 in 60 women develop breast cancer. The incidence begins to rise in the early thirties and peaks at the age of 50 64 years.CausesThe exact cause of breast cancer is not known. However, several factors affect our risk of developing breast cancer. The chances of developing the disease depends on a combination of our genes and bodies, lifestyle, life choices and the environment. Being a woman and age are the two biggest risk factors.The other risk factors aren Early puberty: Women who started their periods at an early age have a slightly increased risk of breast cancer. The earlier you began your periods, the higher your risk, but this effect is small and gradual. The increase in risk is probably because of the longer exposure to the female hormone estrogen.

nLate menopause: Women who go through themenopause later than average have a slightly increased risk of breast cancer. The later you go through menopause, the higher your risk, but this effect is small and gradual. The increase in risk of breast cancer seen in women who have a late menopause is probably because these women are exposed to the female hormone oestrogen for longer than women who go through the menopause earlier.

n Genetics: In a small number of women, breast cancer runs in the family. Of allwomen who develop breast cancer, up to 15% has asignificant family history of the disease and about one in 20 has inherited a fault in a gene linked to breast cancer. Women who have inherited faults in known breast cancer genes such as BRCA1 or BRCA2 are atincreased risk of developing breast cancer.

n High breast density: The amount of tissue compared to fat in your breasts is known as breast density. Having high breast density (a low proportion of fat) is one of the biggest risk factors for breast cancer. The density of your breasts tends to gradually fall over time, but because age is also a risk factor for breast cancer, this does not mean that your risk of breastcancer reduces as your breasts change. In fact, your risk of breast cancerincreases as you get older.n Ethnicity: A white woman is more likely to develop breast cancer than a black, Asian, Chinese or mixed-race woman. Ashkenazi Jews and Icelandic women have a higher risk of carrying inherited faults in breast cancer genes, such as BRCA1 or BRCA2, which are known to increase the risk of developing breast cancer.Life choices, lifestyle and environment: Factors that increase the risk of breastn cancer are: Weight gain, lack of exercise, alcohol, hormone replacement therapy, the combined oral contraceptive pill, ionizing radiation, radiotherapy, stress and possibly shift work.Pregnancy and breastfeeding reduce the risk. Age and number of pregnanciesaffect the risk. The earlier the pregnancies and the more the number of pregnancies, the lesser is the risk of cancer. Breastfeeding slightly reduces your risk of breast cancer and the longer you breastfeed, the more your risk of breast cancer is reduced. Breastfeeding may reduce breast cancer risk by altering the balance of hormones in the body and by delaying the return of your periods.

How do I reduce the risks?Unfortunately, there is nothing that you can do to change most of the above risk factors. Lifestyle modifications should as detailed above should be made.But all women should be breast aware this means knowing what is normal for you so that you are aware as soon as something changes. The sooner you notice a change the better, because if cancer is found early, treatment is more likely to be successful. Get into the habit of looking at and feeling your breasts from time to time. This will help you to notice any change if it occurs.

What is Breast Self-Awareness?Breast self-examination (BSE) and clinical breast examination are inexpensive and noninvasive procedures for the regular examination of breasts. Evidence supporting the effectiveness of these 2 screening methods is controversial.Even with appropriate training, breast self-examination has not been found to reduce breast cancer mortality. In fact, most of the expert groups now recommend breast self-awareness instead of BSE. Breast self-awareness is a womans attunement to the normal appearance and feel of her breasts, so that she can seek medical advice if she notices any changes such as pain, a mass, new onset nipple discharge, or redness.

The author is the director, senior obstetrician and gynaecologist - Fortis La Femme Hospital, Richmond Road, Bengaluru.

See more here:
One in 28 women develops breast cancer - The New Indian Express

Despite the attention being paid to how genetics affect our risk for certain diseases, inherited gene mutations are not the contributing cause to most breast cancer diagnoses. About 85% of breast cancers occur in women who have no family history. These cases occur due to genetic mutations that happen as a result of the aging process and lifestyles in general. What are the contributing lifestyle factors?

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) and Dr. Kristi Funk, breast cancer surgeon and author of Breasts: The Owners Manual have teamed up in a campaign to educate women (and men!) about the ways that a healthy diet and lifestyle can help reduce our risk for breast cancer. Here are their recommendations:

Choose mostly plant-based foods Plant foodssuch as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and beans lower breast cancer risk in several ways. They help with weight loss, because they are typically low in calories and high in appetite-taming fiber. In addition, high-fiber, low-fat diets can help you gently reduce estrogen levels. In turn, lower estrogen levels can lower your risk of cancer.

Exercise regularly Physical activity lowers the risk of breast cancer. Evidence suggests that exercise helps with weight loss, and it also strengthens immune defenses, which may help the body kill cancer cells that arise. If you are sedentary now, it helps to start exercising slowly and build up gradually. Briskly walking for 10 or 15 minutes three times per week is a good beginning. You can then add 5 minutes to each walk until you are walking for 30 or 40 minutes at a time. When you feel ready to take it up a notch, you can add running, swimming, cycling, or other activities you find enjoyable.

Limit alcohol Alcohol increases breast cancer risk. This is true for all kinds of alcohol, including beer, wine, and liquor. Even one drink a day increases risk. The less you drink, the lower your risk. Alcohol can increase estrogen levels, and it can cause DNA damage the first step in cancer.

Maintain a healthy weight Excess body weight increases the odds of getting breast cancer after menopause. Extra weight can also make cancer more likely to advance when it arises. Fat cells produce estrogens female hormones that can help cancer cells to form and spread.

As we learn more about the things that contribute to the formation of cancer, we can begin to reduce our risk for breast cancer to occur or to come back if youve already been diagnosed. You can learn more about the PCRM Lets Beat Breast Cancer campaign at pcrm.com/letsbeatbreastcencer.

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BEYOND TRIM: Don't give breast cancer a helping hand - SaukValley.com

Exclusive Interview with New West Genetics President and CEO Wendy Mosher

New West Genetics is focused on bringing stable genetics to the hemp business. President and CEO Wendy Mosher spoke with New Cannabis Ventures about the companys experienced team, its research and development efforts and how she sees the competitive landscape for hemp genetics. The audio of the entire conversation is available at the end of this written summary.

100+ Years of Agriculture Experience

The New West Genetics team has extensive experience in agriculture. Moshers background is in education, but she spent many summers working in labs. Dr. John McKay, a fellow co-founder of the company and Moshers husband, is a plant geneticist. Over the 25 years they have been together, Mosher learned about genetics and found herself attracted to its practical applications.

When Dr. McKay and Dr. Richard Fletcher decided to start a business, Mosher was the perfect fit to lead it. Neither Dr. McKay nor Dr. Fletcher had any business experience, but Moshers time as a teacher equipped her with the skills to facilitate teamwork while pursuing goals.

Drs. McKay and Fletcher bring experience in plant genomics and breeding. The team also includes Daphne Preuss, Chief Business Officer; Frank Curtis, Director of Operations; John Berlejung, R&D Production Supervisor; and Sarah Hirstwood, Executive Assistant to the CEO.

Preuss comes from a genetics background. She was a professor at the University of Chicago, and she started a successful sorghum breeding company. Curtis, experienced in adapting crops, led a wheat program for 12 years before joining New West Genetics. Berlejung has an MSc. in soil and crop science. Hirstwood comes from a marketing background and leads the companys social media and marketing initiatives. The company also just added agronomist Daniel Willis to the team.

Stable Seeds and Extraction

Genomic knowledge in the hemp industry is 100 years behind a crop like corn, and the industry desperately needs stable genetics, according to Mosher. New West Genetics is focused on creating and licensing stable, proprietary seeds. Creating those stable seeds takes years. The company began in 2014, and its first stable seed was certified in 2017. The companys seeds are certified by the Association of Official Seed Certifying Agencies (AOSCA).

The company has received patent claims for some of its novel varieties, and it is submitting more claims to protect its work. New West Genetics has a pipeline of new varieties rolling out every year.

In addition to its seed licensing model, the company partners with extractors. Mosher is not concerned that uncertainty in the regulatory environment for CBD will affect New West Genetics. She sees continued demand for hemp-based extract and looks forward to clarified regulations.

Research and Development

Hemp genomics R&D is a part of the New West Genetics strategy. Dr. McKay publishes research through his work at Colorado State University. Recently, he has explored the combined impact of genetics and environment. He found that cannabinoids are mostly (95 percent) controlled by genetics, rather than the environment. As in the world of science, the study will need to be replicated.

The company has also worked on developing enhanced cannabinoids to make extraction more efficient. For example, New West Genetics has a zero THC product. The breeding process means concentrated THC does not need to be removed at the end of the extraction process, saving more than $1,000 per kilo, according to Mosher.

New West Genetics has also developed a genetically skewed gender variety of hemp. Hemp is naturally dioecious, meaning male and female flowers are found on separate plants. The company has skewed the ratio to 90 percent female because having seed is valuable and scalable. In contrast, the common method of chemical feminization means the producer gets no seeds and must redo the costly process each season, according to Mosher. New West Genetics is aiming to make access to cannabinoids more efficient and high-yielding.

Partnerships

Forming partnerships is one of the challenges New West Genetics has faced as it continues to grow. Finding commercial partners with the capital and expertise to deliver on promises did not become truly viable until after the 2018 Farm Bill, according to Mosher. The company has also found it beneficial to work with university partners.

The Competitive Landscape

On the seed side, New West Genetics serves companies creating wholesale seed for grain. On the extraction side, it serves operators in the hemp and food industries. For the first four years of operation, the company was protected by regulations and the inability of many states to participate in the industry.

The company now has a significant head start as more competitors enter the space. It is too early to determine market share, but Mosher believes the company has the most scalable seed-based hemp genetics. She welcomes the competition as a necessity for building a robust industry but also recognizes the importance of capital when it comes to staying ahead of that competition.

Funding and Future Growth

At the end of 2018, New West Genetics raised $3 million. That capital has been used to invest in equipment, particularly important as the company ramps up to production mode, and high-quality team members. As the company focuses on sales, Mosher is planning to hire someone with business development, sales, and seed licensing experience.

Mosher does not see an IPO in the companys future, but it has always considered strategic partnerships.

This year is the companys first step into large-scale production and its first year for revenue after years of developing its stable genetics. Mosher expects revenue to grow 5x annually over the next four years.

As the company grows, it will be focused on the continued development of genomic knowledge. Mosher is looking forward to the industrys work on USDA compliance and the opportunity of hemp in animal feed.

To learn more, visit the New West Genetics website. Listen to the entire interview:

View original post here:
New West Genetics is Bringing Stable Seeds to the Hemp Industry - New Cannabis Ventures

Healthy women who have known risk factors for developing breast cancer should talk to their doctor about taking medication to prevent the disease, says a new recommendation from a national panel of health experts.

The new guidelines from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommend that clinicians consider prescribing tamoxifen (Soltamox), raloxifene(Evista), or aromatase inhibitors to women age 35 and up who are at higher than average risk for breast cancer.

What degree of risk warrants preventive medication must be determined by a woman and her doctor. Among the factors that will be considered include family history, genetics, and whether you havedense breast tissue.

The new recommendations which were published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association and on the USPSTF website update a similar version published in 2013.

They differ in that they now include an additional class of medication, aromatase inhibitors, on the list of drugs believed to help reduce womens risk. (Aromatase inhibitors have not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration specifically for the purpose of preventing breast cancer.)

Although their particular mechanisms vary, the breast cancer medicines recommended by the task force all work by lowering or blocking estrogen a female hormone to decrease breast cancer risk. The medication must be taken daily for a period of five years.

RELATED: Speaking Genetics: A Glossary of Cancer Risk Gene Mutations

In 10 trials reviewed by the task force, all three types of drugs reduced invasive and ER-positive breast cancer but not ER-negative breast cancer. If 1,000 women at higher risk took these medications for five years, youd expect somewhere between 7 and 16 fewer cases of breast cancer, says task force member Michael Barry, MD, medical director of the John D. Stoeckle Center for Primary Care Innovation at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Again, thats out of 1,000, so it may seem like a small number, he says. But of course if youre one of those women, it might be quite important.

The USPSTF stresses that the medication should be considered only for women whose odds of developing breast cancer are higher than average but determining those odds is not always easy.

Widely available risk-assessment models such as the Gail model, the first used clinically, weigh factors including (but not limited to) a womans age, whether she has first-degree relatives with breast cancer, and how old she was when she first got her period.

But such tools are imperfect, and there is no single definition for what constitutes being at higher risk, according to the American Cancer Society.

Although there are a lot of models, they are very rough guidelines, says Leif W. Ellisen, MD, PhD, program director of Breast Medical Oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center in Boston, who was not a member of the task force. Thats challenge number one.

According to Dr. Ellisen, the second challenge for primary care providers is analyzing potential risk versus benefits of these medicines. If we say, Well, this could cut your risk for breast cancer in half if you just take the medicine for five years, that sounds pretty good. But if the womans risk is already quite low, it may not be very meaningful.

Whats more, the medication is not without side effects. Mild side effects include hot flashes, fatigue, and mood swings. More serious ones may include blood clots and other forms of cancer.

RELATED: The FDA Tightens Regulations on Mammograms, Especially for Women With Dense Breasts

Many women who are at increased risk may never learn about the option of taking preventive medication. The task force notes that only 10 to 30 percent of primary care doctors say they have prescribed breast cancer prevention medication. And most of those say they have done so only a handful of times.

I do think most women have never heard of these, says Mary B. Daly, MD, PhD, a professor in the department of clinical genetics at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, who was not a member of the task force. And I think prescribing them has never really been in the realm of primary care.

Dr. Daly advises patients with a family history of breast cancer to mention this to their doctors during the context of family history. Similarly, if a woman is concerned about other risk factors, such as dense breasts, she should mention it.

If their primary care doctor doesnt feel comfortable discussing these [medications], a referral to a breast cancer risk specialist is indicated, says Ellisen.

See the original post here:
New Guidelines: Breast Cancer Prevention Drugs - Everyday Health

Its an age-old question that many social scientists would love to have a definitive answer for are entrepreneurs born or made?

While there have been many studies of the genetics of entrepreneurs, on the face of it, there are several shared mental attributes among those who flourish. We dont need to delve too deeply into the psychological side to recognise the more obvious qualities: being highly motivated, confident, persistent, intuitive and impulsive all behaviours which can be learned by people who dont possess a special gift.

So, could any business owner adopt a similar winning mindset and have a positive impact on their companys outcome?

37pc-48pc of the tendency to be an entrepreneur is genetic

One study carried out by Kings College London into the behavioural and molecular genetics of entrepreneurship found that 37pc-48pc of the tendency to be an entrepreneur is genetic. The study assessed a general pool of 3,000 people, testing the number of businesses a person had started, how long they were self-employed for, and factors such as the desire to run a business. Even if those figures do paint an accurate picture, that still leaves us with 52pc-63pc who doesnt fall into the genetically gifted category.

Whether entrepreneurship is in the blood or not, there are several well-known executives who clearly had a natural entrepreneurial gift from an early age. Take Sir Richard Branson who started selling records from a church, or Lord Sugar, who sold car radio aerials and other electrical goods out of a van when he was a teenager. Humble beginnings and now billionaire business owners.

You cant determine where you start in life, but you can determine where you end up

On the other hand, we have those who had careers in different fields but were driven by entrepreneurial foresight, ambition and a determination to succeed. For example, Karren Brady began her career in advertising sales straight after leaving school and, aged just 23, was appointed managing director of Birmingham City Football Club. Now shes one of the most high-profile, respected business leaders in the UK. Also, Lady Michelle Mone, who was made redundant from a sales and marketing role at a brewing company before having a lightbulb moment which took her from designing bras to founder of the nations leading lingerie brand.

Ask those women the secret to success and you can bet your bottom dollar they wouldnt say it was just down to genetics. As Karren Brady says on her website: You cant determine where you start in life, but you can determine where you end up.

In other words, if people want to start their own business and really make it work, taking certain behavioural steps could help them on their journey. By adopting a different mindset, it will allow people to think and act like the successful entrepreneur they aspire to be.

It would be interesting to see from genetic studies whether a persons gender impacts their probability of being entrepreneurs. As champions of Women in Business, we aim to address the different challenges and barriers facing women when they rise to the top of their profession at our forthcoming Women in Business event, to be held in Farnborough October 16-17. Only one third of UK entrepreneurs are women, so there is a pool of untapped female potential out there who just need the right support and guidance to embrace their entrepreneurial spirit.

Genetics and gender aside, there are skills and behaviours which could be learned to get people into the entrepreneurial mindset.

See also: Everyone knows JK Rowling, but what about other women in business?

Here, we explore some of the most common traits of todays successful business leaders:

An entrepreneurial mindset involves having a steadfast commitment to a defined vision. This unwavering focus remains throughout the up and downs and daily demands of running the business. The end goal should always be front of mind and that will drive you to carry out the necessary steps to accomplish your vision. Strategic planning and thinking are critical for every business owner. Keeping eyes fixed on the big picture means you can see what direction the industry is going in, identify challenges for the company and devise the right solutions to meet your overall initiatives.

A fundamental characteristic of all successful entrepreneurs is their level of confidence in both their ideas and their ability. Buyers and investors will only believe in ideas if the business owner truly believes in them themselves. Be open to constructive feedback or critique but stay completely convinced that your business idea will yield positive results and that you have the capacity to make it happen. Carrying out in-depth research into your business idea will help to dispel any doubts. Know your market, your USP and your key personal strengths to bolster your self-belief.

Being willing to take risks and move outside of your comfort zone is all part of the journey. Entrepreneurs have amazing resilience and thrive off turning around negativity. Risks are inherent in any new venture and we are frequently told by those who have made it that failure is an inevitable part of success. Its crucial that you frame failure as an opportunity to learn. The path to success will hopefully have an upwards trajectory but it is rarely a straight line. Any failure should drive you forward. Observe and absorb what you have learned and use it to progress.

Successful entrepreneurs leverage their strengths and understand that they cant do everything. All business people are naturally better at some things and where there are areas of weakness or lack of knowledge that is the time to outsource and seek external help. Knowing that you cant tackle every obstacle on your own is a strength. If bringing people in house is ruled out on financial grounds, hire consultants to look at the more complex, labour-intensive parts of the business. That will ensure you can focus on the overarching business strategy and not get bogged down by minutiae.

The ability to adapt to change quickly is a key entrepreneurial attribute. Whether theres a new competitor springing on to the scene or dip in demand in the target market. Being flexible means having the courage and conviction to rethink a situation, keeping track of feedback about pricing, products and services and making tweaks when necessary. The path of an entrepreneur will occasionally go off course and flexibility is an important skill to keep you on track.

Christie Day is event director for Women in Business Expo, which takes place October 16-17 at Farnborough International Conference & Exhibition Centre

Start young, sleep less: New study reveals leadership formula

Visit link:
5 habits of highly successful entrepreneurs revealed - GrowthBusiness.co.uk

Oct 04, 2019 10:49 AM EDT

The old saying that people marry their parents may be true for poison dart frogs, and it may even lead to the formation of new species, according to a new study inNaturebased on work at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI).

Strawberry poison dart frogs live on the mainland in Panama's Bocas del Toro province and have been isolated on islands in the archipelago that formed during the past 10 million years as sea level rose. Only a single color morph exists on some islands--orange or green, for example, but on oth-er islands several color morphs exist together, like blue and red frogs.

"In the past, people assumed that this group of brightly colored poison dart frogs were warning predators that their skin is toxic," said Corinne Richards-Zawacki, research associate at STRI and pro-fessor of biological sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. "But predators don't seem to care what color the frogs are, at least based on our earlier experiments. That's why we started asking whether the way they choose mates might lead to populations of different colors on different islands."

The team set up three different situations: baby frogs raised with two parents of the same color (red baby, red parents), baby frogs raised with each parent a different color (red baby, one red and one blue parent) and baby frogs raised by foster parents of a different color (red baby, blue parents). In each case they asked which color the female offspring would choose as mates and which color the male offspring would perceive as a rival.

"We discovered that female frogs with parents of the same color tended to choose mates of that same color, whereas frogs with foster parents of a different color would choose mates the color of the foster parents," said Yusan Yang, who is completing her doctoral thesis at the University of Pitts-burgh. "The same was true for male-male aggression. This tells us that imprinting was more important than genetics when it comes to shaping these behaviors that are based on color."

When baby frogs were raised with one parent of the same color and one parent of a different color, females chose mates the color of their mother, and males chose rivals the color of their mother, indicating that maternal imprinting was probably more important than paternal imprinting.

They also created a mathematical model showing that male aggression based on imprinting, in concert with female mate choice based on imprinting was enough to cause a scenario to evolve, where like mates with like, which could lead to two color morphs becoming separate species.

"We're fascinated by the idea that behavior can play such an important role in evolution," Richards-Zawacki said.

2018 NatureWorldNews.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

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Imprinting on Mothers May Drive New Species Formation in Poison Dart Frogs - Nature World News

Fordecades, it has been known that the mutations in the tumor suppressor genes BRCA1 and BRCA2 are associated with high risks of breast and ovarian cancer,but a new prospective cohort study provides the strongest evidence to date thatthese mutations are associated with the development of prostate cancer (PCa).

TheBRCA2 mutation appears to be morestrongly associated with PCa development than the BRCA1 mutation. In addition, the increased risk of PCa varies byfamily history of the malignancy and the location of the mutation within thegenes.

Ourstudy is unique in that we have recruited healthy men across the UK and Irelandwho have hereditary BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations, and then followed themprospectively for up to 17 years to see if they would develop prostate cancer,said corresponding author Tommy Nyberg, a PhD candidate at the Centre forCancer Genetic Epidemiology at the University of Cambridge in the UK.

Thestudy, which was published in EuropeanUrology, included 376 male BRCA1 mutationcarriers and 447 male BRCA2 mutation carrierswho were identified in clinical genetics centers in the United Kingdom and Ireland.Of these, 16 BRCA1 and 26 BRCA2carriers were diagnosed with PCa during follow-up. Nyberg and his colleagues foundthat the risk of PCa is more strongly influenced by BRCA2 than BRCA1 mutations.The BRCA2 mutation is associated witha nearly 4.5-fold increased risk of PCa, whereas the BRCA1 mutation is associated with an approximately 2.4-foldincreased risk. This translates into estimated absolute lifetime risks fordeveloping prostate cancer of 60% for BRCA2and 29% for BRCA1 mutation carriers.We also found an association with more aggressive prostate cancer for men with BRCA2, but not BRCA1 mutations, Nyberg told Renal& Urology News.

Forthe men with BRCA1/2 mutations, therisk was greater for those from families where several family members had beendiagnosed with PCa than for those without such a family history. This probablyreflects the complex genetic landscape of prostate cancer susceptibility, withseveral genetic variants besides BRCA1/2mutations being known to influence the risk, Nyberg said.

Amongcarriers of the BRCA2 mutation, therisk of PCa increased nearly 1.7-fold with each relative diagnosed with PCa.Compared with the general population, BRCA2mutations in the so-called ovarian cancer cluster region (bounded by positionsc.2831 and c.6401) were associated with a nearly 2.5-fold higher incidence ofPCa, a lower risk increase than for mutations elsewhere in the BRCA2 gene. BRCA2 mutations outside this region were associated with a 5.9-foldrelative risk of PCa. Additionally, the BRCA2mutation was associated with a 5-fold increased incidence of Gleason score 7PCa and 3-fold increased incidence of Gleason 6 or less PCa. The mutation alsowas associated with almost 3.9-fold increased incidence of PCa mortality.

Isee the primary clinical application of our research as facilitating geneticcounseling and the early detection of prostate cancer, Nyberg said. Men whoare discovered to carry a hereditary BRCA2mutation, even if currently healthy, are at considerable risk of developingprostate cancer during their lifetime. A greater understanding of genetic riskvariants is continuously occurring, and consequently genetic counseling forprostate cancer is getting more and more accurate.

AnthonyV. DAmico, MD, PhD, Chief of the Division of Genitourinary Radiation Oncologyat Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Professor of Radiation Oncology at HarvardMedical School in Boston said drugs already are available that target BRCA2 mutations. Studies are needed inmen who harbor BRCA mutations to investigate whether these drugs such as PARPinhibitors and platnium based chemotherapy can reduce the risk of metastasisand death from prostate cancer, Dr DAmico said.

Moreover,the new findings support recommendations that men with a significant familyhistory for PCa, especially those with multiple first-degree relatives with PCa,undergo genetic testing for the BRCA2mutation and then to be seen by a genetics counselor to be considered for screening at an earlier age than recommendedin standard guidelines.

Themajor implication here is that men with BRCA2in particular are at a significantly increased risk of developing clinicallymeaningful prostate cancer, and this risk might be influenced by factors suchas family history and the type of mutation that is inherited, said Amar U.Kishan, MD, Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology at the David GeffenSchool of Medicine of UCLA.

Althoughthe therapeutic implications of the new findings are unclear, it istheoretically possible that men with mutations in DNA repair genes may derivebenefit from drugs such as poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitors, butthe data to support such a strategy are limited to patients with advanced,metastatic castration-resistant PCa. In this setting, olaparib and rucaparibare approved for men with BRCA1/2mutant-tumors, though these mutations can be either inherited or restricted tothe tumor, Dr Kishan said. Whether men with an inherited BRCA2 mutation, whodevelop an aggressive but early stage prostate cancer, would benefit from thistype of therapy, in combination with surgery or radiotherapy, is not known.Several studies are investigating this concept.

ToddMorgan, MD, Associate Professor of Urology and Chief of the Division ofUrologic Oncology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, said the new studyadds important data to help guide patient counseling and may allow for improvedearly detection strategies in men with BRCA1/2 mutations. At his institution, DrMorgan and his colleagues have implemented an early detection clinic for menwith BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations, which is modeled after similar clinics for femalecarriers of these mutations (https://www.rogelcancercenter.org/cancer-genetics/prostate-cancer-risk-clinic).

Medicaloncologist David Wise, MD, PhD of NYU Langone Health in New York, said the newfindings may change the conversation for men carrying the BRCA2 germline mutation. Based on this study and others, newguidelines are needed to personalize prostate cancer screening for men carryingthe BRCA2 germline mutation. Clinicaltrials testing PARP inhibitors, already FDA approved for ovarian and breastcancer, are ongoing in BRCA2-associatedprostate cancer. Based on promising data from these clinical trials, the FDAhas granted breakthrough therapy status for two PARP inhibitors, rucaparib andolaparib, for men with castration-resistant prostate cancer, Dr Wise said.

Reference

NybergT, Frost D, Barrowdale D, et al. Prostate cancer risks for male BRCA1 andBRCA2 mutation carriers: A prospective cohort study [published online September5, 2019]. Eur Urol. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eururo.2019.08.025

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Prospective Study Characterizes PCa Risk Linked to BRCA1, BRCA2 Mutations - Renal and Urology News

Greys Anatomy, NCIS, The Voice, and other top shows have been promoting their season premieres for the past few weeks. ABCs hit reality show Shark Tank kicks off Season 11 this Sunday, September 29, with the infamous Mr. Wonderful putting a little bait in the water for viewers.

This season is already gearing up to showcase competitive waters, with several new and returning guest sharks. Among them are three women who have launched massively successful businesses and are now making their first venture in the tank.

Anne Wojcicki, CEO andco-founder of 23andMe,graduated from Yale University and became a Wall Street analyst. The business owner left finance to start medical school before she co-founded her now highly successful genetics company.

Katrina Lake, founder andCEO of Stitch Fix, created her company in 2011 with the goal of providing consumers with an innovative way to find their ideal clothes,according to ABC News. She succeeded, where now more than 3 million people utilize her styling service.

Known for her powerful athleticism on the court, world-renowned tennis champ Sharapova is also a savvy business owner. Creating thepremium candy line Sugarpova, the tennis star is an advocate of women in business, investing in several female-owned companies and mentoring women entrepreneurs.

In addition to the fierce females in the tank,founder and executive of KIND Daniel Lubetzkywill also be joining the sharks, making his first appearance in the season premiere.

Millionaire investor and fixture on Shark Tank Kevin OLeary, also facetiously called Mr. Wonderful, has landed some of the shows most successful deals. Known for his brash demeanor and love of all things money related, OLeary is extremely selective with which entrepreneurs he will partner.

So its all the more tantalizing for his followers to see his latest tweet promoting the shows premiere. Were baaack kiddies! @ABCSharkTank premieres THIS SUNDAY, OLeary posted on Twitter. I cant tell you much, but I make what could be my favorite deal in Shark History in the first episode! You dont want to miss this. #noseriously#setyourPVR.

Fans of the show realize that any deal that ranks as a favorite of Mr. Wonderful means the potential to make big profits, though the Shark Tank investor is always aware of risk. Ive had many, many successes on Shark Tank and many, many failures, he told CNBC last year. Thats the nature of venture investing.

Last month, the millionaire business owner made news due to a boating crash involving him and his wife Linda on Lake Joseph in Ontario, Canada. Two people were killed and three injured.

Late Saturday night I was a passenger in a boat that had a tragic collision with another craft that had no navigation lights on and then fled the scene of the accident, OLeary said in a statement on August 28,according to Us Weekly. I am fully cooperating with authorities. Out of respect for the families who have lost loved ones and to fully support the ongoing investigation, I feel it is inappropriate to make further comments at this time. My thoughts are with all the families affected.

Earlier this week, Linda OLeary was charged with Careless Operation of a Vessel following an investigation by the Ontario Provincial Police, according to Entertainment Tonight. She is scheduled to appear in the Provincial Offences Court in Parry Sound, Ontario,on October 29.

Now that the authorities have concluded their thorough investigation, I have no further comment other than to say that our thoughts and prayers are with the friends and families of those who lost loved ones in this awful tragedy, a spokesperson for OLeary told Entertainment Tonight. Our hearts go out to them.

The outcome of the October court date is sure to be detailed in upcoming news headlines.

See original here:
'Shark Tank's' Kevin O'Leary Just Teased the Show's Season Premiere With This Interesting Tweet - Showbiz Cheat Sheet

Three wolves found a new home at Isle Royale National Park a remote island cluster on Lake Superior by the Upper Peninsula bringing the islands wolf population to 17.

The goal of the Isle Royale wolf translocation effort is to have at least 20 new wolves moved to the island over a three to five year period. The park is in year two.

Last year, park officials translocated wolves from Minnesota and Ontario to repopulate the island.

Isle Royale National Park Public Information Officer Liz Valencia says this year seven wolves were caught in the Upper Peninsula for translocation, but only four were deemed fit for life on the island. Researchers conduct field tests while catching the wolves to determine if they are a good match, she says.

The four, two males and two females, were brought to the park during the week of Sept. 9, but one female died within the first few days on Isle Royale.

Valencia says the researchers wanted to bring in wolves from Michigan to widen the genetic pool on the island, which would help with the long-term sustainability of the population.

Once the wolves are on the island there is limited opportunity for wolves to come and go. And also limited opportunity to bring new genetics in, so they recommended bringing in wolves from a variety of different places, she says.

Researchers plan to study the wolves over the next few months with a focus on the social organization and reproduction of the wolves, Valenciasays.

The rest is here:
3 more wolves added to Isle Royale on Lake Superior - Interlochen

Seedstock producers might have one of the toughest jobs in the beef industry as theyre tasked with raising quality animals that can go down several different avenues. Whether it be into commercial herds or registered, the resulting animals need to be able to perform.

Several influencers sat down on a panel at the first Cattle U event in Dodge City, Kansas, at the United Wireless Arena July 31. Cattle U was sponsored by High Plains Journal. The seedstock panel included Glen Klippenstein of Missouri; Lee Leachman, Leachman Cattle of Colorado; Rick Pfortmiller, Neogen; Kelli Retallick, director of genetic services at Angus Genetics Inc.; and Tom Strahm, commercial marketing director for the American Gelbvieh Association. The panel was moderated by Lorna Marshall of Select Sires.

What are the top factors that you think influence bull purchases the most, today and in the next five years?

Journal photo byKylene Scott.

Strahm said a couple of traits come to mind for him.

Well, I think two of them would be calving ease and growth right now, he said.

Pfortmiller, who works for a genetics company, said choosing the most important traits depends on what the beef producer is going to do with their resulting calves.

As we interact with customers, we hear a couple of things, he said. One would depend on where theyre kind of coming from, in terms of their cowherd, what their focus is.

If the producer is strictly in the business to sell calves right off the cow, traits like longevity and docility rise to the top.

Docility is one that we get thats justified as more of our customers are getting a little longer in the tooth, Pfortmiller said. Then the other piece that I think is just all that is an increase of predictability. People are looking at any of the information thats coming in, and how can I reduce my risk?

Leachman said producers are paying attention to indexes that help predict profitability in the cattle.

Thats probably the No. 1 driver, maybe even more than any other component traits, Leachman said. They probably have gone to worrying less about how they get there, and more about how much profit they generate.

And that surprises Leachman, because if you look at the industry as a whole, yearling weight tends to be a big driver.

But in our model, its not a big driver, he said. Our customers are pretty much not worried about buying lower growth cattle, which I found surprising, and that we put more emphasis on explaining the difference between the maternal index and just went profitability from birth to weaning versus weaning to yearling, weaning to harvest.

What technology is going to be most applicable for commercial cow-calf producers in the next five years?

Pfortmiller is both a commercial producer and works in genomics and believes the holy grail is efficiencyand just not feedlot efficiency.

The notion of cow efficiency out there on the range, the things that I think were going to learn about animal behavior, and adaptability and all of that, Pfortmiller said.

However, theres not many good phenotypic databases out there with the genomic companies.

We get approached nearly every day by groups, small breeds, other groups wanting us to find a DNA test, he said.

Journal photo byKylene Scott.

But that requires a couple thousand phenotypic records of cows who are all the same age, raised the same way and raised in the same environment. Thats nearly impossible.

Strahm agrees. He knows of a commercial producer whos selected traits that are important to him and his production system and environment. He selected certain traits and had done a considerable amount of DNA testing, which he used to select replacements. His home-raised replacements go back into the herd and the others are fed out. The producer has a very extensive data set for his Balancer bulls and cows.

Recently, he took 10 years worth of data from feeding his own cattle, put it all on one grid to keep the value and price constant, Strahm said. And he increased the value of those cattle $300 per head for a 10-year period, and primarily focused on improving marbling, improving growth, and maximizing carcass growth.

Strahm was impressed he was able to market those cattle and get top dollar.

Then to be able to market those cattle in the end and keep everything in check, and take a balanced approach so that you can keep those replacement females in his herd, he said.

From Marshalls perspective at Select Sires, she thinks producers need to use the tools that are already available.

I think sometimes we leave a lot of money on the table, we dont pay attention to dollar values or selection indexes, or we dont pay attention to the EPDs, maybe as much as we should have, Marshall said. Im taking advantage of things even as simple as parentage testing.

In pastures with multiple potential sires and trying to avoid inbreeding, it gets hard to determine which bulls arent doing their job. Using a genetic test to determine exactly which animals are from each bull can be really valuable to the commercial producer.

When we think about things like Gene Max Advantage, and some of the other commercial heifer replacement tests that are out there, theres things out there right now that we can capitalize on, Marshall said. I know when we talked about the cost per test, $28, it seems like enough of an upfront cost test for your replacement females to find the best ones. But when we think about how much it costs to actually build that replacement female, right to get her into production, you know, $28 actually seems like a pretty incremental piece of cash.

Leachman sees the benefit of DNA tests to help predict which cows are going to stay in the herd for a long period of time.

If our DNA tests can predict that, thats something you should go home and use, because right now, you pick those heifers and there are differences in productivity, Leachman said.

There are tests that can help predict calf performance and weaning weights on the cows progeny, but its still hard to predict a cows longevity.

What we cant predict really well is whether theyre going to stay there and be there, Leachman said. I think we all know that when we go out in our herd, and we look at these 10-year-old cows that have had nine calves, that theyre making us money. We also know that when we go out after preg check, and we get rid of those young females that are open, they didnt make us money.

Leachman believes a tool is close that will help producers find out which heifers have a higher propensity to end up in the 10-year-old category instead of the open two and three and four.

I think that we need to be testing that tool and putting it to work, Leachman said.

What would be the most important thing a commercial cow-calf producer needs to look for in their seedstock provider?

Klippenstein shared a quote, in life, business, and politics its one third motion two-thirds promotion. And in order to succeed in the beef industry, one has to promote.

Otherwise, youd never get a chance, he said. Which is the most important thing to develop a positive reputation.

Klippenstein said he always aimed to raise good bulls that would make his customers money.

The sum total of all kinds of things that all of us, any one of us, who are in the cow business can do, if we want to, Klippenstein said.

In his time in the business, hes seen some magnificent herds from guys who just went through high school, but knew exactly what kind of cattle they wanted and spent time with the herds.

Now weve got all these tools, he said. Lets go to the people who have the reputation and understand the use of the tools and say this is what I want to do with my genetics with bulls I buy from you.

Pfortmiller said it comes down to one thingintegrity.

Find a seedstock supplier that is managing their cattle in a way that youre trying to manage them, he said. Theres all kinds of tools that you can use, but if you start with those two things youre going to be pointed in a pretty good direction.

In the future, Pfortmiller believes transparency will stay at the top of mind.

I think the technologies we hear aboutthe block chain and all of thatI think were going to have a greater opportunity to transfer that transparency to all the related parties.

Leachman echoed those sentiments, and believes the biggest thing cattle producers are going to have to deal with in the next three years, is something thats been lurking in the shadows for a while.

Maybe we dont think about it enough, but seems like the last time the dairy herd had to liquidate we had a significant disruption in the market, Leachman said.

With the alleged animal abuse videos coming from large dairies, Leachman thinks it will influence how consumers see beef producers even though the industries are different.

Were not dairies, but those videos are what people think about us, he said. Theyre coloring how they think we treat our animals. Its a big problem for us, because we are going to get judged by the rotten apples that are lying in the grass. And I think its a big risk right now.

He believes were dangerously close to seeing a massive reshuffle in the dairy industry, that could hurt the beef industry in the short run.

It could change the way calves are being raised on dairies and theyre precarious enough at this point that this would push a bunch of dairies out of business, Leachman said.

For Retallick, picking a seedstock supplier that aligns with breeding goals and objectives is vital.

If you are selling your calves and weaning and finding those seedstock producers that are really developing their bulls and aiming their genetic potential towards that specific environment versus are you retaining ownership on those animals through the feedlot and hanging them on the rail, she said. And really trying to approach your seedstock provider as a person who really aligns with your own personal goals.

Also create your own breeding objective first, then knowing where you want to go and create that plan.

I think one of the biggest things we have to do is stick with the plan, Retallick said. I see it in the seedstock industry more probably than in the commercial industry, but in the seedstock industry it seems like we can really chase things. We can chase the biggest number.

Cattle producers should stay disciplined and believes some of the most successful seedstock producers are the ones who have stuck to their goals and objectives for their operations.

It doesnt matter what your breeding goal or breeding objective is as long as its making you profit and its making your customers profit, she said. But make sure you have a breeding goal, and stay disciplined to it. Stick with it.

She said when incorporating genetic or tech tools, remain disciplined and carry through with themeven when the data doesnt show what a producer was wanting or expecting.

Then they dont reap the full benefits of something like that and so if you can remain consistent I think and disciplined, I think thats one of the biggest things we can kind of do in all segments of the industry, Retallick said.

See more here:
Influencers eye the future of seedstock industry | Livestock - High Plains Journal

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TONING is not real.

It is believed to be a process of exercise, which will result in a toned body a fit-looking body that is not excessively muscular.

This process is supposedly brought about by exercising the muscles, including those in trouble areas, with the expressed goal of not making them bigger but tighter and firmer.

This concept is a physiological impossibility. The idea that muscle will become tight and less jiggly is not how muscles develop.

Muscles will not become firmer in your day-to-day life because of a few exercises. The development of muscles have a few variances, which are perceivable:

Bigger or smaller through hypertrophy (growth) or hypotrophy (shrinkage);

Stronger or weaker;

More conditioned (accommodate for shorter recovery time, greater endurance ability and speed) or less conditioned;

More effective stretching or shortening.

Toning was born out of the fear expressed by women, that although they didn't want to have unwanted jiggling, they did not want to become muscular and manly-looking, or lift heavy weights either.

Gym owners, exercise instructors, trainers, and coaches assured these women that they could tighten their muscles without making them bulky, by using lighter weights, body weight, bands with light to medium resistance, higher repetitions, and at times incorporating more movement, perhaps aerobic or dance.

The facts

Flexed muscle is firm. Relaxed muscle, being mostly water, is jiggly. Fat is jiggly, tight skin is tight, and stretched out or weakly elastic skin is loose. Finally, bone is rigid.

So ultimately it comes down to what you are made of between your bones and skin and the elasticity of your skin.

If you have little body fat:

And have never stretched out your skin, your body will appear tight (non-jiggly, toned), even if you have very little muscle;

And large muscles and your skin is tight, you will appear tight;

But have stretched skin and little muscle, you will appear jiggly and loose.

If you have excess body fat and have damaged the connection between your skin and your muscle's fascia (the sheet of connective tissue which acts like a glue between skin and muscle) then:

If your skin is still elastic and tight, you may not appear jiggly;

If your muscles are smaller, you may appear more jiggly;

If your muscles are larger, you will appear less loose and jiggly.

If you are losing fat, lessening the fat under the skin:

Less muscle will naturally mean less utilised volume between the skin and more, resulting in a loose jiggly appearance;

Increased muscle will be needed to occupy as much of that space left from the loss of fat to avoid a loose jiggly appearance and feel.

Take-away message

a. Little muscle, little body fat but stretched skin, you will appear jiggly and loose.

b. Excess fat, less muscle, you will appear more jiggly.

c. Larger muscles, less jiggly (this is why tummy tucks are often the only solution for the waist. Often, a lot of fat is lost, but the muscles of the waist do not grow and occupy a much greater relative volume.

When losing fat, increased muscle will be needed to occupy as much of that space left to avoid a loose jiggly appearance and feel.

More facts

The only solutions to avoid jigglyness are:

1. Tighter skin, which only youth, genetics and surgery can significantly provide. Do not waste time and money believing that products will help.

2. More subcutaneous fat: Worst solution ever fated to be a long-term disaster.

3. More muscle: A solution filled with a world of benefits.

There is only one effective way to significantly increase muscle and this is through progressive resistance training. You have to activate the muscle under tension, resulting in (perfectly natural) microscopic tears, which will heal with nutrition and rest, resulting in muscle hypertrophy (growth).

It is proven that this is most effectively attained with resistance, which the individual will consider heavy. So heavy, in fact, that instead of dancing or hopping around with the weight, they may only be able to accomplish three to 10, perhaps 12 repetitions, essentially training like a body-builder, as, of course, that is what is needed for muscle building.

Do not fear, if your goal is to avoid a manly, bulky appearance, rest easy. That appearance takes more time and dedication than you can likely find, and often still, only with the use of anabolic steroids.

If you are a female, you can rest even easier, that bulky look requires a level of testosterone that the very great majority of women can never have.

So, as hard as you try, at best you will simply look the way one should athletic, healthy and fit.

Fitz-George Rattray is the director of Intekai Academy, which is focused on helping people live a healthy lifestyle through nutrition and weight management. If you are interested in losing weight or living a healthier lifestyle, give them a call at 876-863-5923, or visit their website at intekaiacademy.org.

Now you can read the Jamaica Observer ePaper anytime, anywhere. The Jamaica Observer ePaper is available to you at home or at work, and is the same edition as the printed copy available at http://bit.ly/epaperlive

See the rest here:
That toning myth - Jamaica Observer

Denisovans are a mysterious group of our ancient relatives, unknown until a decade ago, who lived alongside Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. The hominin species is thought to have ranged from Siberia to Indonesia, and many places in between (although some researchers believe the Denisovans could actually be multiple species or groups). When these curious human cousins vanished, they left behind surviving bits of their DNA in living Melanesian and East Asian people, but not much else. So far, the only known Denisovan fossils include just a few teeth, a finger bone and a small fragment from a Russian cave, and a partial jaw found on the Tibetan Plateau.

Yet today its possible to stare into a Denisovan face for the first time thanks to a striking reconstruction created by some genetic detective work. Scientists used patterns of gene expression mined from ancient Denisovan DNA, which was extracted from a 100,000-year-old pinkie finger, to reconstruct the physical characteristics of a Denisovan face and skulleven though such a fossil has never been found.

Geneticist Liran Carmel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem said other groups have worked to map anatomical features from the information hidden in our DNA. But his team took a different approach, outlined in a study published today in Cell.

We didnt rely on the DNA sequence per se, Carmel says. But from the sequence we used a technique which allows you to reconstruct gene activity patterns in these ancient individuals so we can compare the way the genes work in the different human groups.

The addition of methyl groups to DNA, or molecules derived from methane, impacts the ways genes activate and express themselves, in turn determining what physiological traits those genes produce. Carmels group mapped these methylation patterns to recreate the likeness of a young female Denisovan, which the pinky bone belonged to. Evolutionarily speaking, its well known that many anatomical or physiological differences between closely related groups are attributed to changes in gene activity patterns. This is exactly what we can find using our technique, Carmel says.

Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum, London, who was unaffiliated with the study said via email that the reconstruction of Denisovan anatomy is a pioneering piece of research, which at first glance seems almost like science fiction. This is exciting work, pushing the boundaries of what can be gleaned from ancient genomes.

The techniquemapping methylation patterns in DNA to determine gene expression and anatomyis still fairly new. The research relies on a complex chain of extrapolations, Stringer says. It cannot show us with perfect accuracy what a Denisovan looked like, but earlier research of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA suggested methylation changes could be used to explain anatomical differences. For the new study, when Carmel and colleagues tested their technique against known Neanderthal and chimpanzee anatomy, they found a close match.

Using these types of epigenetic techniques to predict the traits of living humans is still difficult, so applying it to the ancient DNA of an extinct hominin species has its limitations. Denisovans, a little-known hominin group that may be comprised of at least three different lineages, were uncovered a decade ago with a bare handful of tooth and bone fragments found in a cave called Denisova in Siberias Altai Mountains. They were the first human group to be named by DNA evidence, as only genetics revealed that the fossil fragments were from people distinct from Neanderthals. Like Neanderthals, they likely descended from an ancestral population that branched off from our own modern human family tree between 520,000 and 630,000 years ago.

But the branches of that tree continued to intertwine for many thousands of years. DNA reveals that modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans interbredperhaps more frequently than we might imagine. These ancient interspecies liaisons made headlines last year when a 90,000-year-old female found in a Siberian cave turned out to be the first generation hybrid offspring of a Neanderthal mother and Denisovan dad.

Carmel and colleagues mapped out Denisovan, Neanderthal and human DNA to find regions where methylation patterns differed. They then looked at modern disorders that impact the function of those same genes to try to find out what kinds of anatomical changes the ancient pattern variations might have caused. For this they employed the Human Phenotype Ontology database, which charts the genetic underlies of some 4,000 human disorders, and has produced a catalog of more than 100,000 gene-phenotype associations.

Basically, from the DNA sequence, we infer which genes have changed their activity level across the human groups and from this we make inferences about changes in anatomy, Carmel says.

By this method the team was able to reconstruct what a complete Denisovan skull and face might have looked like. They then put the method and its reconstruction predictions to the test, despite the lack of a Denisovan skull that could show how accurately the DNA evidence predicted various features of its anatomy in their reconstruction.

We tested the approach by pretending that we dont know what a Neanderthal or a chimpanzee looks like. So we reconstructed their anatomy and then compared the results to what is known.

As it turned out, real-world Neanderthal and chimpanzee fossils showed that 85 percent of the trait reconstructions accurately predicted anatomical features, like a shorter or longer section of jawbone.

While the completed study was under peer review, an incredible opportunity arosethe discovery of an actual Denisovan jaw. The 160,000-year-old jawbone was found high on the Tibetan Plateau and identified as Denisovan through the analysis of proteins preserved in the teeth. Carmel and colleagues had a chance to check their work against an actual Denisovan fossil.

This was very exciting for us, Carmel says. When we submitted the paper to Cell we only had a few teeth and a finger bone to compare to our predictions. We immediately went to check how it compared to our predictions. And we find a beautiful match, so this was very reassuring for us.

Stringer agreed that the method has produced some intriguing matches with the fossil record, though it didnt always hit the mark. The results suggest that Denisovans should have features such as a low braincase, a wide pelvis and large joint surfaces and ribcage. Of course, our knowledge of real Denisovan anatomy is very limited, but features such as a long and robust jaw (from the Xiahe mandible), and a flattened and broad braincase (from the only known skull fragment) do seem to match the methods predictions, he says via email. Stringer noted that other characteristics, like thicker enamel and broader fingertips compared with modern humans, didnt match as well.

More Denisovan fossils could not only flesh out what the skulls and faces looked like, but further refine the predictive abilities of DNA methylation patterns.

There are skulls and partial skeletons from Chinese sites such as Jinniushan, Dali, Harbin and Xuchang that might also represent Denisovans, although we dont yet have their DNA or ancient proteins to test this, Stringer says.

If the skulls found in China are Denisovan, they would support the predictions in features like strong brows, wide skulls and a wide pelvis, but their faces would not project Neanderthal-style as the methylation prediction would suggest. Further muddying the waters is growing evidence from both modern and ancient DNA suggesting that the hominins currently dubbed Denisovan may well be a very diverse group that stretched across Asia.

In reality, their anatomy is likely to have shown substantial variation through space and time, Stringer says.

As genetic reconstructions improve, and additional fossils are found to check the predictions, this research could reveal what many early humans looked like. Scientists might even be able to produce an entire gallery of ancient faces, painting a family portrait of long-vanished relatives we could previously only imagine.

Read the original here:
Scientists Recreate the Face of a Denisovan Using DNA - Smithsonian

Four wolves were released at Isle Royale National Park in September/NPS, Phyllis Green

Four wolves were moved to Isle Royale National Park in September to bolster the island's predator population, but one died shortly thereafter.

The wolves were moved to the park on September 13 fromMichigans Upper Peninsula. One of the wolve's collars issued a mortality signal last weekend, and biologists located the animal's carcass on Tuesday. The body was to be sent to the USGS National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin, for necropsy.

The surviving wolves included two males and a female. Theybolstered the island wolf population to 17, which now includes nine males and eight females.

Capture, anesthesia, and translocation are stressful events for wolves and the impact of that stress on each individual wolf is unknown, Isle Royale Park Superintendent Phyllis Green said of the dead wolf. There is a field examination, however, underlying health conditions of wolves prior to their capture are difficult to determine. The analysis of the samples collected during the examination and the necropsy may reveal more information about the cause of death, which will inform future transfers.

The National Park Service worked closely with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, U.S. Department of Agriculture APHIS Wildlife Services (APHIS Wildlife Services), and the State University of New York-College of Environmental Sciences and Forestry on the project.

Three of the four wolves released at Isle Royale National Park in September survived/NPS, Phyllis Green

From September 5 13, seven wolves were captured; three of those not meeting translocation criteria were immediately released. The four adults were examined, documented, tagged, and fitted with tracking collars before being flown to the park on a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service airplane.

Adding genetics from Michigan wolves was a key piece of the puzzle to provide the best opportunity for genetic diversity that supports the sustainability of the introduced population. The Michigan DNR, APHIS - Wildlife Services, and SUNY-ESF did an outstanding job, given the weather, Green said. Our focus now will be on broad population goals and the opportunity these Michigan wolves represent. We will continue to learn what we can and track how the wolves integrate into the island landscape.

The three to five year effort to establish 20-30 wolves on Isle Royale is being completed in order to restore predation as a key part of the island ecosystem. Researchers involved in the planning effort recommended this number of wolves from the Great Lakes region. Additionally, they recommended an equal number of males and females in order to establish genetic variability in the new population. The NPS and its partners will monitor the wolf population to determine evidence of social organization, reproduction and predation.

More:
Four More Wolves Moved To Isle Royale, One Dies Shortly Thereafter - National Parks Traveler

I'm a man and I will beat up anybody who tries to tell me I'm not a man just because my hair is thinning.

Actor Bruce Willis

Like me, many of you have seen TV ads for regrowth systems and treatments for thinning hair. I'm not talking about those who go through cancer treatments and lose their hair. These ads target people who lose hair or get thin on top due to aging or genetics or both.

These ads feature glowing reports from men about how much more masculine they feel after using the system. Or they feature the "before" guys who sadly say things like, "I didn't want my wife to leave me." Men have been made to feel less manly if they don't sport a thick head of hair.

It's often called male pattern hair loss but I've also heard male pattern baldness. According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, it's the most common type of hair loss in men and is related to genes and the male sex hormone. It usually follows a pattern of receding hair and thinning on the crown.

Each strand of hair emerges from a tiny hole or cavity in the skin called a follicle. Baldness occurs when the hair follicle shrinks over time, resulting in shorter and finer hair. Eventually the follicle does not grow new hair.

But on the flip side, many women struggle with thinning hair, too. I reached out with questions to the University of Arkansas for Medical Science and got answers from Dr. Lauren Gibson, the chief resident who works in the department of family and preventative medicine.

Gibson says that, yes, there is also female pattern hair loss. While men tend to lose hair in a widow's peak receding pattern, women tend to lose in the front, center part of the scalp close to the forehead, the area known as "the bald spot."

Female hair loss can occur any time after puberty, but more often it happens after menopause. Because it's not as common as in men, there is not a significant amount of research or a consensus about what causes it.

There are many potential causes of hair thinning and loss aside from menopause.

The most common cause is telogen effluvium. It can be caused by diabetes, thyroid disorders, auto-immune diseases, nutritional deficiencies in calories, proteins, vitamins or minerals, smoking tobacco, excessive alcohol, illicit drug use and some medications.

Gibson says telogen effluvium can also be caused by acute or chronic major illness, major surgery, childbirth, rapid weight loss, severe emotional stress, skin infections of the scalp and inflammatory conditions of the scalp.

But this is not an exhaustive list, there are many other causes. I get the impression that this type of hair loss can possibly go away or slow down.

According to The North American Menopause Society, thinning hair happens to about half of all women by age 50, while up to 15% of women begin to experience hair growth on their chins, upper lips or cheeks after menopause.

Hair changes are common during the menopause transition and post menopause. Many factors, including hormonal changes, genetic predisposition and stress, can contribute to midlife hair changes. Along with telogen effluvium, there is also something known as androgenetic alopecia. "Alopecia" means baldness, but it does not have to be complete hair loss. It is seen as hair thinning predominantly over the top and front of the head, affects approximately one-third of all susceptible women and is most commonly seen after menopause.

It has been said that the increased ratio of androgen to estrogen during the midlife transition can influence hair changes.

There are treatments. Topical minoxidil is an FDA-approved, once-daily treatment found in most over-the-counter hair regrowth shampoos.

For those whose hair loss may be caused by underlying illness or other problems, treatment of the problem is the first line of defense.

The bottom line, Gibson says, is that if a woman is concerned by hair loss, she should talk to her doctor first. Together they can evaluate the pattern, gather a history and perform a physical exam, and if needed, evaluate for any underlying causes.

Email me at:

rboggs@arkansasonline.com

Style on 09/23/2019

Read this article:
PRACTICALLY ACTIVE: Failing follicles? That's a hairy subject - Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

HOUGHTON, Mich. (WLUC) - The Isle Royale fall wolf translocation project concluded on September 13 after successfully moving three wolves from Michigans Upper Peninsula to the park.

The new wolves, two males and one female, bolstered the total island wolf population to 17, which now includes nine males and eight females.

A fourth wolf was moved to the park on September 13, but its collar sent out a mortality signal over the weekend. Biologists from the National Park Service (NPS) and State University of New York College of Environmental Sciences and Forestry (SUNY-ESF) located the wolf and confirmed the mortality late on Tuesday afternoon. The carcass of the wolf will be sent to the USGS National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin, for necropsy.

Capture, anesthesia, and translocation are stressful events for wolves and the impact of that stress on each individual wolf is unknown, Isle Royale Park Superintendent Phyllis Green noted. There is a field examination, however underlying health conditions of wolves prior to their capture are difficult to determine. The analysis of the samples collected during the examination and the necropsy may reveal more information about the cause of death, which will inform future transfers.

The NPS worked closely with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR), US Department of Agriculture APHIS Wildlife Services (APHIS Wildlife Services), and SUNY-ESF on the project. From September 513, seven wolves were captured; three of those not meeting translocation criteria were immediately released.

The four adults were examined, documented, tagged and fitted with tracking collars before being flown to the park on a US Fish and Wildlife Service airplane.

Adding genetics from Michigan wolves was a key piece of the puzzle to provide the best opportunity for genetic diversity that supports the sustainability of the introduced population. The Michigan DNR, APHIS-Wildlife Services, and SUNY-ESF did an outstanding job, given the weather, Green said. Our focus now will be on broad population goals and the opportunity these Michigan wolves represent. We will continue to learn what we can and track how the wolves integrate into the island landscape.

The three to five year effort to establish 20 -30 wolves on Isle Royale is being completed in order to restore predation as a key part of the island ecosystem.

Researchers involved in the planning effort recommended this number of wolves from the Great Lakes region. Additionally, they recommended an equal number of males and females in order to establish genetic variability in the new population. The NPS and its partners will monitor the wolf population to determine evidence of social organization, reproduction and predation.

See the rest here:
3 wolves added to Isle Royale population during fall 2019 wolf project - UpperMichigansSource.com

In 1969, Margaret Rossiter, then 24 years old, was one of the few women enrolled in a graduate program at Yale devoted to the history of science. Every Friday, Rossiter made a point of attending a regular informal gathering of her departments professors and fellow students. Usually, at those late afternoon meetings, there was beer-drinking, which Rossiter did not mind, but also pipe-smoking, which she did, and joke-making, which she might have enjoyed except that the brand of humor generally escaped her. Even so, she kept showing up, fighting to feel accepted in a mostly male enclave, fearful of being written off in absentia.

During a lull in the conversation at one of those sessions, Rossiter threw out a question to the gathered professors. Were there ever women scientists? she asked. The answer she received was absolute: No. Never. None. It was delivered quite authoritatively, said Rossiter, now a professor emerita at Cornell University. Someone did mention at least one well-known female scientist, Marie Curie, two-time winner of the Nobel Prize. But the professors dismissed even Curie as merely the helper to her husband, casting him as the real genius behind their breakthroughs. Instead of arguing, though, Rossiter said nothing: I realized this was not an acceptable subject.

Acceptable or not, the history of women in science would become Rossiters lifework, a topic she almost single-handedly made relevant. Her study, Women Scientists in America, which reflected more than a decade of toil in the archives and thousands of miles of dogged travel, broke new ground and brought hundreds of buried and forgotten contributions to light. The subtitleStruggles and Strategies to 1940announced its deeper project: an investigation into the systematic way that the field of science deterred women, and a chronicling of the ingenious methods that enterprising women nonetheless found to pursue the knowledge of nature. She would go on to document the stunted, slow, but intrepid progress of women in science in two subsequent volumes, following the field into the 21st century.

It is important to note early that womens historically subordinate place, in science (and thus their invisibility to even experienced historians of science) was not a coincidence and was not due to any lack of merit on their part, Rossiter wrote at the outset in the first volume. It was due to the camouflage intentionally placed over their presence in science.

Rossiters research has been revolutionary, said Anne Fausto-Sterling, a Brown University professor emerita and an expert on developmental genetics, who was astonished by the first volume when it came out. It meant that I should never believe anything anybody tells me about what women did or didnt do in the past, nor should I take that as any measure of what they could do in the future.

Academic historians typically dont have an immediate impact on everyday life. Rossiter is the exception. In excavating the lives of forgotten women astronomers, physicists, chemists, entomologists and botanists, Rossiter helped clear the way for women scientists in the future. Her work showed that there were women in science, and that we could increase those numbers, because women are quite capable of it, said Londa Schiebinger, a historian of science at Stanford University. In addition, Rossiters work illustrated that administrators needed to reform academic institutions to make them more hospitable to women. She showed that very talented women faced barriersand so that sparks something.

Rossiters findings were impressive to key figures at the National Science Foundation, which funded her research over many yearsand which, starting in the 1980s, also began funding efforts to increase the representation and advancement of women in engineering and academic science degrees. Schiebinger said, All of Margaret Rossiters well-documented work gives an intellectual foundation for these things.

Today, Rossiter, 75, has scaled back her research efforts and carries a light teaching load at Cornell. But her work remains deeply important, in large part because she knew how to make a point stick. Back in 1993, Rossiter coined a phrase that captures an increasingly well-recognized phenomenon: the Matilda Effect, named after a suffragist, Matilda Gage, whose own work was overlooked by historians, and who also wrote about the way women scientists, in particular, had been erased by history. Rossiters 1993 paper decried the troubling recent history of male scientists receiving credit for work done by female scientists. The phrasethe Matilda Effecttook off, and has been cited in hundreds of subsequent studies. A 2013 paper, The Matilda Effect in Science Communication, reported that both men and women judged research papers by men to be stronger than those by women, and both men and women showed preference for the male authors as possible future collaborators. In the past year alone, dozens of papers on gender discrimination in science have cited the Matilda Effect. In naming the phenomenon, Rossiter identified the issue of misplaced credit as a problem that institutions would have to fight to rectify, and that equality-minded scholars are monitoring with even more rigor.

Both Margaret Rossiter and Matilda Gage made substantial original contributions to American scholarship that were, for too long, not recognized as significant; and, interestingly, both tried to bring to light the work of other women who suffered the same fate. Their births separated by more than a century, the two nonetheless have almost a symbiotic relationship, with the work of one giving new life to that of the other in a collaboration across time to advance the role of women in the sciences, a fight ongoing in laboratories and the halls of academia.

* * *

The Matilda Joslyn Gage Center, in Fayetteville, New York, is a gracious cream-colored Greek Revival building, renovated and restored to something close to the state it was in when Gage was working furiously to secure women the right to vote. A small desk in the bay window of the back parlor is the same one where she likely wrote dozens of editorials for her newspaper, the National Citizen and Ballot Box, the official publication of the National Woman Suffrage Association; upstairs was the guest bedroom where the suffragist Susan B. Anthony, with whom she frequently collaborated, often stayed.

On the day I agreed to meet Rossiter there (she lives in Ithaca, 60 miles to the south), Colleen Pilcher, then the museums deputy director, was waiting to greet her. She had prepared tea and set aside time for a tour. The museums founder, a historian named Sally Roesch Wagner, who has devoted much of her career to uncovering Gages achievements, left a note saying she was sorry not to be there to see Rossiter, to whom we are so grateful for creating the concept of the Matilda Effect, which we refer to regularly.

Rossiter looked around, taking in a framed photo of Gage propped on a side table: Gage, her curly hair by then gray, stared out in profile, intent and focused. Think what they were up against, Rossiter said, speaking of the suffragists. Men controlled everythingthe press, the church, every local and national political office. They had all the power, everywhere.

Gage was the daughter of an exceptionally forward-thinking father, an abolitionist and doctor who raised his daughter to practice medicine. No medical school in her area would accept a woman, so instead, while the mother of five children, she channeled her intellect into abolitionist activism (her home was a stop on the Underground Railroad), as well as the burgeoning suffragist movement. She spoke at the third National Womans Rights Convention in Syracuse, in 1852, and was a founding member of (and frequent officeholder in) the National Woman Suffrage Association.

A freethinker who championed the separation of church and state, Gage was also the first known American woman to publish a study of American women in scienceanticipating Rossiter by a century. In Woman as an Inventor, published as a tract in 1870 and in the North American Review in 1883, she wrote, The inventions of a nation are closely connected with the freedom of its people. Given more liberty, she argued, women would only help the countrys technological progress. To support her argument, she listed many of the inventions women had initiated (the baby carriage, a volcanic furnace for smelting ore, the gimlet-point screw, to name a few). Gage also asserteda contention some historians considerthat Eli Whitney merely manufactured the cotton gin after being given very specific directions by its actual inventor, Catharine Littlefield Greene, widow of Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene, who had settled in Georgia. Every part of the world felt the influence of this womans idea, wrote Gage. If Greene did not take out a patent for the invention, Gage said, it was because to have done so would have exposed her to the ridicule and contumely of her friends and a loss of position in society, which frowned upon any attempt at outside industry for woman.

Rossiter first learned about Gage in the early 1990s, while reading a relatively obscure book about overlooked women intellectuals. Soon after that, in 1993, Rossiter attended a conference at which researchers presented several papers on women scientists whose work had wrongly been credited to men. It was a phenomenon, Rossiter recalled thinking. You need to name it. It will stand larger in the world of knowledge than if you just say it happened. She decided on the Matilda Effect, after Matilda Gage, and wrote an essay in the journal Social Studies of Science that she called The Matthew Matilda Effect in Science. (The Matthew Effect was a term coined previously by two sociologists, to describe the practice of more powerful scientists being given credit for the work of those with less recognition.) Gage, Rossiter wrote in that essay, noticed that the more woman worked the more the men around her profited and the less credit she got.

The purpose of naming the phenomenon, Rossiter asserted in her essay, was to help current and future scholars to write a more equitable and comprehensive history and sociology of science that not only does not leave all the Matildas out, but calls attention to still more of them.

Rossiters historical research has spotlighted hundreds of women scientists in america. here are a few of the most notable who persevered to expand our understanding of the universe, from black holes to genes to computers

The cytogeneticist was the first woman to receive an unshared Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded in 1983. She traveled extensively for two decades to collect maize samples in South and Central America. Her research demonstrated the existence of mobile genetic elements, also known as genetic transposition, the capacity of genes to change position on a chromosome.

Rossiter cited one victim of the Matilda Effect who dated back to the 11th century, but also included more recent examples such as Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a doctoral student in radio astronomy at Cambridge University in the late 1960s. Bell Burnell was the first in her lab to discover the astronomical object that would lead to the identification of pulsars. Despite her obvious contributions, she was not included in the all-male citation when her team won the physics Nobel Prize for this work in 1974. Last year, 25 years after Rossiter acknowledged Bell Burnells accomplishments, and 44 years after she was robbed of the Nobel, Burnell won the Special Breakthrough Prize. The award comes with $3 million, all of which she donated to Englands Institute of Physics, to fund underrepresented figureswomen, refugees and ethnic minorities. I have this hunch that minority folk bring a fresh angle on things, Burnell told the BBC.

* * *

Rossiter thought that her first visit to the Gage museum would be a pleasant excursion to a historical site of personal interest to her. Instead, it turned out to be something of a revelation. It was not, in fact, the patriarchy that wrote Matilda Gage out of history, Pilcher explained, citing decades of research by her colleague Wagner. The powerful figures who marginalized Gage were her two fellow suffragist collaborators, after a falling out over the role of religion in the movement.

Gage felt that Christianity was the root of womens problems, Pilcher said. Elizabeth Cady Stantons writings, Pilcher explained, would later reveal how strongly Stanton concurred; but in the desperate pursuit of an expanding constituency to support the vote for women, Stanton and Susan B. Anthony made what they must have perceived as necessary compromises. They collaborated with religious womens groups, including the Temperance Union run by Frances Willard, which wanted to establish Jesus as the titular head of the United States government. The move alienated Gage, who split from Stanton and Anthony to found her own, competing suffragist group. When Stanton and Anthony revised a work on which Gage had originally collaborated, the History of Woman Suffrage, Gage was no longer listed as an author.

Hmm! Rossiter exclaimed, clearly fascinated. You would have thought theyd have been more sisterly. It was fortunate, she added, that the house still stood. It was here that Wagner had discovered a trove of letters that shed so much light on this hidden figure of history. If the house had burned down, Rossiter said, that would have been the end of it.

It is an odd wrinkle of feminist history that one of the most powerful terms used to identify overlooked female scientists has been named after a woman diminished not by male credit-grabbers but arguably the two most influential feminists in American history. In their effort to win the vote, Stanton and Anthony made choices that bowed to traditional power structuressome of them racist, some of them based in the church, and all of them controlled by men. In that regard, perhaps, it could be said that it was the male establishment that coerced Stanton and Anthony to erase Gage. But in the end, patriarchy eliminated even Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Rossiter later wrote in an email. Because in my day (undergrad and grad in the 1960s) all womens history had been forgotten or obliterated and was not taught at much of any colleges. When the founders of womens history began to start research and writing (1970s), they all had to bone up and read Eleanor Flexners Century of Struggle, the only survey of the subject and for which the author had had a hard time finding a publisher.

* * *

Fifth generation of Malden, Mass., Rossiter likes to say of her birth, as if that New England pedigree reveals much about her essence. Malden may be little known, but its history of resistance is rich: It was the first town to petition the colonial government to secede from British rule. The first same-sex couple to get legally married in the United States was from Malden (they were married in nearby Cambridge). Rossiters father was a Harvard graduate and high school history teacher; and her mother, who graduated from Radcliffe, raised her children, only working outside the home later in life, after receiving a masters degree. By high school, Margaret Rossiter, a bookish girl in a bookish home, had developed a fascination with the history of science. Margaret, who plans to study math at Radcliffe this Fall, lists biographies of the 17th century as her favorite reading matter, the Boston Globe reported in 1962, in an article that celebrated Rossiter as one of several National Merit Scholarship winners from the area. That was before Newton developed the calculus, 17-year-old Rossiter was quoted saying. She went on to Radcliffe, and would graduate in 1966. Even in her first year she remembers poring over Isis, the history of science journal, in a top bunk in her dorm room.

Following an unsatisfying grad-school stint at the University of Wisconsin, Rossiter transferred to Yale, which is where she found herself, on Friday afternoons, surrounded by pipe smoke, beer and history of science professors and students, nearly all male. From 4:30 to 6, Rossiter said, you endured this for self-preservation. Mary Ellen Bowden, also a history of science graduate student at the time, would become a senior research fellow at the Science History Institute. She recalls Rossiter, as a graduate student, as someone who seemed like a quiet sort, but once you got her one on one, talked on and onshe was very perceptive and critical of the things going on around her. Some scholars just hit the books, but Margaret had other interests in humanity. Rossiter completed her PhD at Yale, in 1971, a rare woman in a small, backward-looking field, and took a fellowship at Harvard, where she happened, one afternoon, to peruse American Men of Science, a kind of encyclopedic history. Despite the certainty of her mentors at Yale about the nonexistence of women scientists, and despite the very title of the volume, she was surprised to see entries about womenbotanists trained at Wellesley, geologists from Vermont. There were names, and patterns she could trace from one to the other. (Rossiter also would conduct research on women in science at Smithsonian Institution archives and libraries in Washington, D.C.)

In Malden she picked up the family Volkswagen, then drove around to womens colleges, delving into boxes of archives. She identified what she called protg chains of women educated by professors who then went on to replace those professors, some tracing their lineage back several generations. Scouring indexes for obituaries, she discovered women scientistsbut they were segregated, cloistered at womens colleges (she defined this as territorial segregation); or they were undervalued, underpaid, kept in assistant jobs where they did mountains of tedious work, never promoted like their male counterparts (hierarchical segregation). She also discovered, reading letters of recommendation, a way of thinking she called restrictive logic, in which male scientists relied on nonsensical rationales to explain why a particular female scientist could not be promoted (a classic example: because there was no precedent). She found, in short, that many men of science were incapable of reason when it came to women. Womens credentials, she wrote, were dismissed as irrelevant in favor of stereotypes, fears, and long-cherished views. Examining, for example, the collective efforts of male professors to halt the likely appointment to a full professorship of the famous German physicist Hertha Sponer, at Duke, Rossiter vented that Sponer was evidently up against not only all the other applicants for a job at Duke in 1936 but also certain physicists collective views and misconceptions about all of womankind.

Rossiter herself, more than a decade out of graduate school, still had failed to secure a tenured position, and was a visiting scholar at Cornell. Margaret knew she deserved to be on a tenure track, Fausto-Sterling recalls, and something was wrong that she was notit wasnt like, Oh, Im so lucky to have any job. It was, This is not right.

Then, in late 1982, Rossiter published the first volume of Women Scientists in America, with Johns Hopkins University Press. To her surprise and her publishers, the New York Times gave the historical tome a rave review. The rich detail she discovered about the history of American women scientists is placed in the context of social change in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the result is a splendid book, wrote the reviewer, Alice Kimball Smith, a historian.

Rossiter was a visiting scholar at Cornell when she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (or the so-called genius grant) in 1989. The following spring of 1990, a tenure-track offer arrived from the University of Georgia. Even so, Cornell seemed ready to let her depart. She thinks a female member of the Cornell board of trustees intervened, because, suddenly, Cornell offered to create a new department aligned with Rossiters intereststhe Graduate Program in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Tenure followed in 1991. I remember being so relievednow I could get back to my next book, instead of apartment hunting, said Rossiter. After many years of identifying with the struggles of those whom she was studying, at last she found the kind of institutional support to document the obstacles faced by those who did not have such support but deserved it.

It is not only women in science who have much to learn from Rossiters research, said M. Susan Lindee, a historian of science at the University of Pennsylvania. We have to look at her past work carefully, said Lindee, and re-examine all those brilliant strategies that women used to contest institutional power, which was oriented around preventing them from succeeding.

In 2013, Fausto-Sterling, whose own work has challenged sexist presumptions in evolutionary science, stepped forward to make sure that Rossiters contributions would be widely accessible. Fausto-Sterling joined forces with a former student of hers, Maia Weinstock, who had led a series of Wikipedia edit-a-thons, events where volunteers amplified entries about the lives and achievements of female scientists published in the free, crowd-sourced online encyclopedia. Fausto-Sterling found that Rossiter, at that point, merited only whats known as a stuba few lines. I was shocked that she had this skeleton entry, said Fausto-Sterling, who went on, during that editing session, to contribute a fleshed-out entry about Rossiter.

Rossiter was one of the first to map out a problem in science that its practitioners are only now struggling to address with peak urgency: Earlier this year, the prestigious medical journal the Lancet devoted an entire issue to the underrepresentation of women in science, announcing, among other things, that less than 30 percent of the worlds researchers in science are women. The Lancet studies took up many of the questions that Rossiter first posed in 1982. What biases are holding women back? Where are their numbers lowest, and why? Why do they receive less funding than men? But the mistreatment of women in science and other professions had already caught fire in the public imagination with the rise of the #MeToo movement.

* * *

The University of California, Berkeley found in 2015 that the prominent astronomer Geoffrey Marcy had violated its sexual harassment policy. A 2018 report from the University of Texas system found that about 20 percent of female science students, more than 25 percent of female engineering students and more than 40 percent of female medical students had experienced sexual harassment from faculty or staff. This year, Dartmouth reached a settlement of $14 million with nine women who alleged that three tenured professors in the Psychological and Brain Sciences department had been allowed to cultivate an environment of sexual harassment and discrimination.

It is fascinating, then, that Rossiter could have written no fewer than 1,200 pages about women in sciencewho had even less power and fewer rights during the period she covered than they do nowwithout so much as a hint that sexual harassment and, quite likely much worse, drove some women away from the sciences. Until recently, Rossiter said, she had not considered just how powerful a role harassment or assault must have played in the history of women in science. It explains the dropout rate, she said.

Rossiter said she never experienced any sexual harassment herself; and never knew, for example, that more than one of her professors at Yale shocked her fellow student Mary Ellen Bowden by making sexual overtures. I remember feeling like it was my fault, Oh, I must have led him on, said Bowden, who realized only with the advent of the #MeToo movement that she was not to blameand that she should have been protected from harassment.

If Rossiters fellow student and friend was not revealing her secrets in real time, neither were the scores of women, long dead, whom Rossiter was studying through their letters, reviews, prizes and pay stubs. She coaxed, from those dusty papers in cardboard boxes, administrative workings and ventings about pay and overt biases and self-justifying rationales; she cross-referenced job trends with hiring patterns, the professionalization of a field with college graduation rates. But it is clear only now how much more those archives hid than they disclosed.

Nobody ever mentioned anything, said Rossiter. Those women likely just disappeared from the field. M. Susan Lindee, the science historian from the University of Pennsylvania, said she is not surprised that those issues did not surface in the documents. There was no infrastructure, no way for it to show up in administrative records, said Lindee, who nonetheless believes that harassment must have been everywhere.

Perhaps a future scholar, were she or he to sift through the same thousands of documents that Rossiter examined, might read between the lines of those letters and administrative files. There must have been incidents of harassment and violence, but also genuine office love affairs, complicating resentments that male colleagues felt about women in the workplace; there would have been ambition punished with shame, and compromise mixed with resignation.

When Rossiter started her research, the Xerox was fresh technology; she worked with paper trails, but of a certain discreet kind. Archivists were discouraged from acquiring papers that were too personal. I never saw a love letter, any financial materials, nothing on health, hardly anything about children, she wrote in an email. What I did was a kind of preliminary mapping.

Rossiter frequently goes to her office at Cornell, stacked with boxes overflowing with paper, but she cannot get into the basements and attics where families tended to stash their great-grandmothers letters. She is not terribly interested in digital research; for her, nothing is more satisfying than a manila envelope full of long-ignored documents.

In one of those many cartons in Rossiters office is a letter, from a woman scientist, that was particularly meaningful to Rossiter, mailed not long after the publication of her first volume of Women Scientists. I greatly enjoyed your work, Rossiter recalled the letter as saying. The woman went on, I have spent a lot of money on psychotherapy because people kept telling me I was maladjusted.

Rossiter, with one well-constructed sentenceAs scientists they were atypical women; as women they were unusual scientistshad made it clear to this particular woman that she was not the problem. Societys restrictions were the problem.

Rossiters book, the woman said, had done more to help her than therapy.

This was revelatory. It had never occurred to Rossiter, she said, that a clear rendering of history could be so useful.

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Women Scientists Were Written Out of History. It's Margaret Rossiter's Lifelong Mission to Fix That - Smithsonian.com

Name: Susan Alberts

Title: Robert F. Durden Professor of Biology and Chair of Dukes Department of Evolutionary Anthropology

Years at Duke: 21

What she does: Susan Alberts spends most of her work hours looking at or thinking about baboons.

Since the late 1980s, Alberts has worked with the Amboseli Baboon Research Project to gather data on hundreds of baboons in Kenyas Amboseli National Park. She studies how the social and physical environments of the baboons determine their life outcomes.

She has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles in the fields of anthropology, genetics, endocrinology, biologyand primatology.

Her research has led to a number of findings. Her team discovered that female baboons that integrated into their social groups have higher offspring survival rates. Meanwhile, baboons who experience adversity early in life droughts, death of a parent or a mother that is socially isolated die younger than other baboons.

Were not just understanding baboons but uncovering general principals about how social life affects opportunities and health, Alberts said. Theres a lot of coincidence in how social issues affect baboons and humans.

Alberts teaches The Life and Work of Darwin, Behavioral Ecology and the Evolution of Animal Behavior, Concepts in Evolutionary Anthropology and other courses in the biology and evolutionary anthropology departments at Duke.

She also takes graduate and undergraduate students with her to Kenya for field research.

Were staying in our research camp for weeks with not a lot of modern convenience, she said. Its always exciting to watch the students adjust and thrive in a completely new environment.

What she loves about Duke: Alberts cant think of another university that would allow her the opportunity to focus on research as much as the leadership at Trinity College of Arts & Sciences.

Duke is one of the few places I have the freedom to do to my kind of research, Alberts said. It takes a lot of infrastructure to do this abroad. It takes good grant support. It takes good administrative support. Duke has worked really hard to make all this possible.

Memorable day at work: The U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a nonprofit organization of the countrys leading scientific researchers, elected Alberts as a member in May. The recognition is considered one of the highest honors a scientist can receive.

I was thrilled and honored, Alberts said. Its my job now to pay it forward and make the most of the opportunity.

Special object in her office: When the National Academy of Sciences named Alberts a member, she popped a bottle of champagne and placed the cork among a collection of eight others on a bookshelf in her office. Other corks represent each Ph.D. student Alberts has advised.

We always celebrate with a glass of champagne when they defend their thesis, Alberts said. I collect the corks because each of those moments is a huge event. I feel so much admiration to my students.

Best advice received: As as postdoctoral researcher, Alberts received a Fellowship at Harvard Universitys Society of Fellows, a group of scholars recognized for their academic potential, after completing her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.

Alberts didnt feel qualified for the fellowship and called her mentor, Jeanne Altmann, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, saying I think they made a mistake!

Altmann told Alberts, It doesnt matter, just dont get immobilized.

Jeannes advice helped me focus, Alberts said. I had to show up and do my best.

First job: Alberts worked at a Seattle bakery called The Little Bread Company after high school. She arrived every morning around 4:30 to knead and mix doughs for whole wheat, rye and sourdough loaves of bread.

I liked working with my hands, Alberts said. I learned so much about how you work with people coming from different backgrounds and who have different expectations, desires and abilities. It really helped me develop.

Something most people dont know about her: Alberts loves jigsaw puzzles. She recently worked on a 500-piece puzzle with the image of a sea turtle.

I dont have much time to do them, but I love them, she said. I love the process of just starting out with a big mess and putting it into a coherent image.

Is there a colleague at Duke who has an intriguing job or goes above and beyond to make a difference?Nominate that personfor Blue Devil of the Week

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Blue Devil of the Week: A Renowned Baboon Scientist - Duke Today

A replacement heifer represents the costliest improvement in the genetics of a herd. Some of the more important influencers that are critical to the success of retaining these genetics over time include hiring the right female, reaching a target breeding weight, proper development, and a defined breeding season.

As we know, reproductive traits are very lowly heritable; 10% controlled by genetics and the other 90% controlled by management and environment. This forces us to be intentional managers within the environment we live. Being better managers naturally forces us to use more data to make decisions that can improve fertility responses from good nutritional management.

Related: Pregnancy check replacement heifers to protect investment

The goal in developing replacement heifers is reaching puberty by the beginning of the breeding season. Puberty in heifers is controlled by three factorsbody weight, age and breed.

With breed, we know that on average Bos taurus cattle reach puberty between 12 to 14 months of age; whereas Bos indicus cattle reach puberty later at approximately 16 to 18 months of age.

Related: Weighing the costs of buying or raising replacement heifers

Heifer body weight has a very influential impact on age at puberty. Research conducted in the 1980s reported that heifers weighing approximately 60-65% of their mature body weight reached puberty prior to breeding.

Not every heifer will make a good replacement heifer. The female you want to hire conceives early in the breeding season. However, to get there we need to make some decisions earlier on in the hiring process.

You need a pool of candidates to start with based on your job description. The job description will lay out minimum requirements the heifer has to have in order to go through the development process.

These requirements should include, at minimum, no freemartins, minimum body weight, minimum age, structural soundness and not out of terminal sires. Throughout the development process, checkpoints need to be in place to monitor the heifers performance of your heifers.

And finally, after the breeding season, is she pregnant and preferably early on in the breeding season? Then, and only then, should we hire her for the job!

To properly develop heifers to 60-65% of mature body weight, you need to know the mature body weight of your cows, otherwise it is just a guess. If you dont know what your cows weigh, you dont know what 65% of mature weight is and what those heifers should weigh at breeding.

At minimum, know what the average weight of your cow herd is so you can determine what her expected mature body weight is. If you have the capabilities to determine this individually, then you can avoid breeding heifers that are too light or too big. The implications of developing heifers too light is not reaching puberty. Developing heifers that are too heavy (or too fat) is a reduction in fertility rates and increased development cost.

Proper development starts with knowing how much she weighs, how much she needs to weigh, how many days you have to get her there and what her nutrient requirements are. Then, you can determine what her average daily gain needs to be and monitor progress to make sure she is on track for breeding.

Typical forage-based development diets for heifers consist of 9% crude protein and 60% total digestible nutrients to achieve a steady rate of gain of 1.5 pounds per head per day. Some programs develop heifers at different rates of gain at different stages of development. Overall, results seem to be similar, regardless of the development stages, as long as she reaches her target breeding weight and is on a positive nutrition plan throughout the development period.

Drastic changes in diets prior to the breeding season can cause wrecks sometimes. Some work out of South Dakota showed significant decreases in pregnancy rates in replacement heifers that were turned out on grass pasture from a dry lot in late spring at the beginning of the breeding season. To avoid this, make sure heifers are on the same forage system (diet) at least 30 days prior to the breeding season.

Without a defined breeding season, we cant manage for fertility. Work out of Clay Center, Neb., in the 2000s reported a higher retention rate across nine calving seasons in replacement heifers conceiving in the first 21 days of their first breeding season compared to heifers conceiving after day 42 of the breeding season.

Preliminary data out of Louisiana State University reported similar results where 28% more heifers conceived to timed-AI during their first breeding season and developed to more than 65% of mature body weight remained in the herd through their fifth calving season, compared to heifers bred by natural service within a 75-day breeding season. In that study, heifers that reached more than 65% of mature body weight at breeding were out of smaller cows, and as a result had a lighter target mature body weight.

The perfect development protocol is one that results in heifers reaching the target age, weighs 60 to 65% of mature body weight, has reached puberty, conceives within the first 21 days of the breeding season and does not require taking out a loan to develop her. Nutrition is critical to ensuring heifers reach puberty by the start of the breeding season. Intentional management plays a major role in achieving high fertility rates during the breeding season at a manageable cost.

Walker is Noble Research Institute livestock consultant. Contact him at rswalker@noble.org.

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How to hire the right replacement heifers for your job - Beef Magazine

Contrary to claims made, genes from genetically-modified Aedes aegypti mosquito were found to have been transferred to naturally-occurring A. aegypti mosquito population in three areas in Brazil where transgenic mosquitoes were released. It is unclear if the presence of transgenic mosquito genes in the natural population will affect the disease transmission capacity or make mosquito control efforts more difficult. A.aegypti mosquitoes are responsible for transmitting dengue, chikungunya and Zika virus.

About 4,50,000 transgenic male mosquitoes were released each week for 27 months (June 2013 to September 2015) in three areas in Brazil. Genetic analysis of naturally occurring mosquitoes were done prior to the release and at six, 12, and 27-30 months after the releases.

Researchers from Yale University studied 347 naturally-occurring A. aegypti mosquitoes for transfer of genes from the transgenic insects. The transgenic strains can be distinguished from naturally-occurring mosquitoes by using fluroscent lights and filters. They found that some transgenic genes were found in 10-60% of naturally-occurring mosquitoes. Also, the naturally occurring A. aegypti mosquitoes carrying some genes of the transgenic mosquitoes were able to reproduce in nature and spread to neighbouring areas 4 km away. The results were published in the journal Scientific Reports.

The genetic strategy employed to control A. aegypti population known as RIDL (the Release of Insects carrying Dominant Lethal genes) is supposed to only reduce the population of the naturally occurring A. aegypti mosquitoes and not affect or alter their genetics. Also, offspring are not supposed to grow to adult mosquitoes and reproduce as per claims made by the British company Oxitec Ltd, which had developed the technology and field-tested it in several countries.

The claim was that genes from the release strain would not get into the general population because offspring would die. That obviously was not what happened, senior author Prof. Jeffrey Powell from Yale University was quoted as saying on the University website.

The genetic strategy works on the premise that the transgenic male mosquitoes released frequently in large numbers would compete with the naturally occurring male mosquitoes to mate with the females. Offspring from the mating of transgenic male mosquito and naturally occurring female mosquito do not survive to the adult stage. This is because tetracycline drug, which prevents the dominant lethal gene from producing the lethal protein during rearing in labs, is not present in sufficient quantity in nature. In the absence of tetracycline, there is overproduction of the lethal protein causing the larvae to die.

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Transgenic mosquitoes transfer genes to native mosquito species - The Hindu

On Sunday afternoons a truck filled with cherimoya leaves Stoneacres Farm in the Eastern Cape to travel the almost 900km throughout the night and arrive at the Johannesburg Municipal Market by early Monday morning.

Hopefully by Wednesday it has been sold, notes Alan Stone, cherimoya and kiwi farmer from Stoneacres, Stutterheim, a region better known for its forestry and sheep.

It has a very short shelf life, and the market for it is very restricted. The Portuguese community in South Africa know the fruit. Demand isnt really growing. I dont send to Cape Town because there are one or two cherimoya producers in the Western Cape. I send about sixteen consignments (each about 800kg) of cherimoya to Johannesburg in a good year. More cherimoya wouldnt sell.

He sometimes sends to East London or Port Elizabeth, but 95% goes to Johannesburg in 4kg- and 2kg boxes.

Cherimoyas, known as custard apples in South Africa, seem to break every rule in the commercial fruit production handbook: their flowering period is erratic and difficult to predict it could be in November but last year it was February and March, with disastrous consequences. As a result, its difficult for Alan to predict when hell have a crop, but operating in a very sparsely populated field gives some room for manoeuvre.

The cherimoya, sold as custard apples in South Africa

Weather makes or breaks fruit set Its a problematic plant. Fruit set is another problem. The cherimoya is a very primitive plant with a most unattractive flower. On the first day that the flower opens it is female and on day two it is a male flower. There is an overlap between the female and male state, but there no known pollinator for the flower and it all depends on temperature and humidity, which are critical.

Last year their cherimoya orchards flowered during February and March, when conditions were not suitable: high temperatures were accompanied by low humidity, and there was very low fruit set. Usually if it flowers in November, after its brief springtime deciduous period, the harvest starts in June or July and can go into December, although by that time there is so much summer fruit on South African shelves that Alan winds it down.

Spanish cherimoya geneticsHe has been growing cherimoya for 15 years now, taking its quirks as they come. He was looking for something to supplement his Hayward kiwi orchard dating back to 1992, when prices were very high and everybody was planting kiwis, Alan says.

Kiwis are very labour-intensive, worldwide production has increased and kiwi imports from countries with subsidised farming have had an impact on kiwi price points locally.

The Agricultural Research Council in Nelspruit was testing Spanish Jete cherimoya cultivars. From them Alan obtained his plant material, and being in a high-altitude area that experiences frost Stutterheim is adjacent to the Amathole Mountains he established a modest two hectares, but quite enough for the Gauteng market, mostly South Africans of Portuguese descent, often via Madeira where cherimoya is said to grow wild.

Cherimoya orchard in Stutterheim, Eastern Cape (photo supplied by Stoneacres)

It currently fetches around R70 (4.3 euros) per kilogram at the market, less the agent commission of 14%.

Unfortunately, here, too, its been dry. The worst drought in living memory, Alan calls it, and he notes that the fruit are also much smaller this year. Its an area that receives above-average rainfall by South African standards, approximately 800mm, but there has been no rain for three or four months now, he says. The Stoneacres orchards are irrigated from a spring-fed dam.

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Cherimoya cultivation in the Eastern Cape - FreshPlaza.com