Friday, October 24, 2008

Save Energy

Because the financial impact of the media in various countries, the visible energy savings in large-scale. Consumptive lifestyle starts left.
How do the people who already have a lifestyle that is not healthy? With skimpy can reduce the body's resistance, especially when they have to like (fat). with the acai berry juice taste will want to continue to eat terkurangi so that the body healthy. What was to try them?

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Thursday, October 16, 2008

Pound for Pound, All Life Uses Same Amount of Energy

If energy is the currency of life, biologists are closing in on the cost of living.
No matter whether you're talking elephants or bacteria, a new study proposes that, pound for pound, all living things' at-rest metabolisms use similar amounts of energy. Though living things vary greatly in complexity and size, their energy usage falls between 3 and 90 watts per kilogram of biomass. For comparison, a MacBook Pro is supposed to draw about 12 watts when operating from its battery.
"Our interpretation is that there aren't very many accidents in nature, so it's not just a coincidence that all these different organisms fall within this narrow window," said Peter Reich, an ecologist at the University of Minnesota, and a co-author of the work. "That suggests that natural selection selects for this range."
Using energy to stave off entropy is one of the basic functions of life. Different forms of life use different energy sources. Plants use photosynthesis to turn sunlight into chemical energy. Other organisms feed on plants or other organisms to obtain the energy needed to sustain themselves. The new paper suggests that no matter how an organism gets its energy, the basic biochemistry of life requires that all organisms' cells use energy at fairly similar rates.
The new work means that if you had an elephant-sized mound of bacteria, it would use, within about an order of magnitude of variation, the same amount of energy as an actual elephant. This information from here

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New Gene Found That Helps Plants Beat The Heat

ScienceDaily (Oct. 14, 2008) — Michigan State University plant scientists have discovered another piece of the genetic puzzle that controls how plants respond to high temperatures. That may allow plant breeders to create new varieties of crops that flourish in warmer, drier climates.
Heat shock protein
The MSU researchers found that the gene bZIP28 helps regulate heat stress response in Arabidopsis thaliana, a member of the mustard family used as a model plant for genetic studies. This is the first time bZIP28 has been shown to play a role heat tolerance. The research is published in the Oct. 6 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"We also found that bZIP28 was responding to signals from the endoplasmic reticulum, which is the first time the ER has been shown to be involved with the response to heat," said Robert Larkin, MSU assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and corresponding author of the paper. "We're finding that heat tolerance is a more complex process than was first thought."
Previous research has shown that the nucleus, the "brain" of the cell, and cytosol, the fluid inside cells, play a role in how plants respond to heat. The endoplasmic reticulum, a membrane in the cell that consists of small tubes and sac-like structures, is mainly responsible for packaging and storing proteins in the cell.
According to Christoph Benning, MSU professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and a member of the research team, the scientists were looking for genes that turn other genes on and off and are tied to cell membranes. These membrane-tethered gene switches are seen in animals but hadn't been studied in great detail in plants.
"The bZIP28 protein is anchored in the endoplasmic reticulum, away from its place of action," Benning explained. "But when the plant is stressed by heat, one end of bZIP28 is cut off and moves into the nucleus of the cell where it can turn on other genes to control the heat response. Understanding how the whole mechanism works will be the subject of more research."
Plants with an inactive bZIP28 gene die as soon as temperatures reach a certain level.
Other scientists on the research team are Federica Brandizzi, MSU associate professor of plant biology and member of the Plant Research Lab, and Hangbo Gao, former MSU post-doctoral research associate.
The work was sponsored by the MSU-DOE Plant Research Lab. Benning's research also is supported by the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station.
this information from here

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