Journal Refresh #3 : Decrypting, Breast Cancer and the Biocompass

I haven't written much for this blog because of my busy schedule so I thought I might as well fill you in with what articles I've been reading lately. I won't write this post in a bibliography style as I did with my other posts.

• Decrypting a brain enigma, written by Kamran Khodakhan based on the letter called Encoding of action by the Purkinje cells by David J. Hertzfeld et al. in Nature Vol 526, Issue No 7573 - pages 326 and 439,respectively.

  These were very interesting to read- I read the "introduction" by Khodakhan first and thus was able to get a better understanding of what the whole letter was about before actually reading it.                

 He compares the computational units of the brain to the ones of

    an Enigma machine and goes on to briefly explain how the cerebellum controls the jerky eye-movements called saccades, according to the results Hertzfeld et al. got. Of course, this is definitely not the whole picture as we cannot be 100% sure about each detail as of yet.

•  Nature Outlook- Breast Cancer -vol 527, Issue No 7578- I've read all the articles in this one and they were all really interesting. However,two caught my attention much more: Another shot at cancer, by Charles Schmidt and Marked progress, by Hannah Hoag- at S105 and S114, respectively.    

The first article talk about cancer treatment from an immunology point of view as in trying to get the body itself turn against cancer. The second talks about the need to be able to describe the course of cancer as in whether one accumulation of cancerous cells will turn invasive or remain non-invasive. This article had DCIS as an example: the ductal carcinoma in situ, which in the majority of cases is a non-invasive type of cancer. Yet, there are cases in which tumours do become aggressive and this is where we need to get better at: when we detect any cancerous growth we should be able to say whether it will get worse or whether it's going to stay at that stage, in order to help women and physicians decide on the best treatment.

• Long-sought "biocompass" discovery claimed, by David Cyranoski in Nature Vol 527, Issue No 7578, page 283. 

This brief biochemistry article talks about the possible discovery of a complex which aligns itself with Earth's magnetic field in order to help animals with navigation and orientation in space. Didn't think it was going to be this interesting when I first read the title but I was wrong.

To another year of amazing scientific discoveries and articles!

                                             Cristina