Teacher, Writer, and all-round geek when it comes to all things museum-y.
I work as a teacher, facilitator, instructor, and educator at the ROM. I am also the main tweeter/blogger for the @ROMHandsOn Galleries
You can find me on twitter @MuseumGirlSarah or @ROMHandsOn
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Insects in amber. From the Dominican Republic, Miocene epoch (23.8 to 5.3 million years ago).
Have you seen our amber collection in the Reed Gallery of the Age of Mammals? A long way from Jurassic Park, but still cool.
Many visitors think that one difference between butterflies and moths is that butterflies are bright and moths are dull, but check out the colours on this Madagascan Sunset Moth in Life in Crisis: Schad Gallery of Biodiversity. It comes out during the day, not at night, so colours are really helpful for communication and identification.
Two baby opossums play on a branch, with one using its tail to cling on, while photographer Ronald Wittek took this photo while visiting a farm in Minnesota, USA
Picture: Ronald Wittek/Arco Images/Solent News (via Pictures of the day: 20 May 2013 - Telegraph)
Families learn how to write their names in Egyptian hieroglyphs in the CIBC Discovery Gallery. The trick is that the symbols aren’t letters — they’re actually sounds!
This Week in Science - May 13 - 19, 2013:
- Magnetar at black hole here.
- Cloned human stem cells here.
- Cell calculators here.
- Music matched to color here.
- Scientists agreeing on climate change here.
- Remote-piloted plane here.
- Earth’s core here.
- Bright lunar explosion here.
- American asteroid sampling here.
- Hofstadter butterfly effect here.
- Electric shocks aid math skills here.
- Printable solar panels here.
Can you see the baby bees? Those white things inside the cells are bee larvae. Come visit the busy hive in the Patrick and Barbara Keenan Family Gallery of Hands-on Biodiversity.
Think you’ve seen everything there is to see in the Hands-on Galleries? Think again! We have a ton of stuff in our collections that we don’t have room to display, but every so often we pull some of it out for special programming, like Facilitator Daniel is displaying here for Earth Sciences Weekend.
Man I am so tired and this is probably full of errors but I have an AM deadline, so here’s Mr. Pangolin in all his glory. Acrylic, colored pencil, and Photoshop/Illustrator.
This is amazing. He might not be a giant, but have you found the pangolin in Life in Crisis: Schad Gallery of Biodiversity?
(Source: mangycoyote)
RIGHT NOW at the Royal Ontario Museum, you can walk on the Moon!
A piece of the moon brought down during one of the Apollo missions, is now on display at the Museum. It’s been put in a wonderful platform for you to walk on.
So you can tell your all your friends you’re one of the few to have ever walked on the moon. #the wittiest thing we’ve ever done
Remember! We also have the Moon on display year around, as well as meteorites from Mars!
Human stem cells successfully cloned for the first time
A working process for cloning stem cells from existing human cells has finally been discovered by a team at Oregon Health & Science University.
These stem cells were created by reprogramming healthy skin cells, a goal that has eluded researchers around the world for years. It’s the first key step in developing medical procedures for replacing dying or injured cells with new ones to stave off disease and age. That could mean growing a new liver, or kidney or heart, in the lab for an organ transplant, or even repairing the brains of those suffering with diseases like Parkinson’s.
The team was led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov from the reproductive and developmental sciences department of the Oregon National Primate Research Centre. He said: “A thorough examination of the stem cells derived through this technique demonstrated their ability to convert just like normal embryonic stem cells into several different cell types, including nerve cells, liver cells and heart cells. Furthermore, because these reprogrammed cells can be generated with nuclear genetic material from a patient, there is no concern of transplant rejection.”
“While there is much work to be done in developing safe and effective stem cell treatments, we believe this is a significant step forward in developing the cells that could be used in regenerative medicine.”
The technique Mitalipov and his team used is called “somatic cell nuclear transfer” — as you can see in the video, it essentially involves sucking out the DNA from an adult cell and inserting it into the empty nucleus of a donor egg. This creates a clone of the original cell, and is in fact the first step in the cloning method used to create animal clones like Dolly the sheep.
However, in its therapeutic mode, the new cells can be grown as replacements for the original type of cell. That objective hasn’t been reached until now as human eggs are extremely fragile compared to many of the animals which we have cloned. That Mitalipov and team have succeeded is down to research on primates, and adapting primate stem cell research to humans.
As a cell divides after fertilisation, it undergoes several transformations as it prepares to split and multiply. The metaphase is the moment just before a cell splits, as the chromosomes align alongside each other in the very centre of the cell so that, when it splits, one goes one way as another goes the other, each taking the full copy of the genetic code. The researchers managed to stall the metaphase while the cell underwent nuclear transfer, effectively giving the new chromosomes time to get settled before the metaphase finished and cell division proceeded.
An added bonus is that the eggs used have not been fertilised, so there won’t be any debates over the ethics of embryonic stem cells as we have seen in the US in the past. While the researchers placed skin cell nuclei into the receptor egg cells, the method is conceivably similar for any other kind of cell.
And, while it may sounds like the first step towards a practical method for cloning humans, the Mitalipov has made it clear that’s not the aim. “Our research is directed toward generating stem cells for use in future treatments to combat disease. While nuclear transfer breakthroughs often lead to a public discussion about the ethics of human cloning, this is not our focus, nor do we believe our findings might be used by others to advance the possibility of human reproductive cloning.”
The research has been published in the journal Cell.
