Melatonin supplements for humans can be given. Melatonin is categorized by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a dietary supplement, not a drug. A prescription-only, timed release melatonin product for people aged 55 and over was approved for use by the European Medicines Agency in 2007, despite having shown only small effects, and in Australia in 2009.
Luria–Delbrück experiment
The Luria–Delbrück experiment, 1943, also called the 'Fluctuation Test', asks the question: are mutations independent of natural selection? Or are they directed by the selection?
Max Delbrück and Salvador Luria showed that in bacteria, DNA mutations happen randomly. This means they happen at any time, rather than being a response to selection.
So, Darwin's theory of natural selection acting on random mutations applies to bacteria as well as to more complex organisms.
Delbrück and Luria won the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine partly for this work.
In their experiment, Luria and Delbrück grew bacteria in tubes. After a period of growth, they split up the bacteria into separate cultures and put them onto agar containing phage (virus). If virus resistance were not due to random gene mutations, then each plate should contain roughly the same number of resistant colonies. This, however was not what Delbrück and Luria found. Instead, the number of resistant colonies on each plate varied to a great extent.
Luria and Delbrück proposed that these results could be explained by the occurrence of a constant rate of random mutations in each generation of bacteria growing in the initial culture tubes.
Polydactyly
Polydactyly is a birth defect which may affects the hands, feet, or both. It causes one or more extra fingers or toes. It can affect people, and other mammals such as dogs, and cats.
Screen Actors Guild
The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) is an American labor union representing over 200,000 film and television principal performers and background performers worldwide. According to SAG's Mission Statement, the Guild was created to negotiate and enforce reasonable salaries, benefits, and working conditions for its performers; collect compensation for exploitation of recorded performances by its members, and provide protection against unauthorized use of those performances; and preserve and expand work opportunities for its members.
The Guild was founded in 1933 in an effort to end exploitation of actors in Hollywood who were being forced into oppressive multi-year contracts with the major movie studios that did not include restrictions on work hours or minimum rest periods, and often had clauses that automatically renewed at the studios' discretion. These contracts were notorious for allowing the studios to dictate the public and private lives of the performers who signed them, and most did not have provisions to allow the performer to end the deal.
In addition to its main offices in Hollywood, SAG also maintains local branches in several major US cities, including: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Honolulu, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, Nashville, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington DC.
Since 1995, the guild has annually awarded the Screen Actors Guild Awards, which are considered an indicator of success at the Academy Awards.
The membership of the Screen Actors Guild voted to merge with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists on March 30, 2012. It was later renamed as SAG-AFTRA.
"Later merged as SAG-AFTRA"
Screen Actors Guild Award
A Screen Actors Guild Award is an award given by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) to recognize outstanding performances by its members. The statuette given, a nude male figure holding both a mask of comedy and a mask of tragedy, is called "The Actor". It is 16 inches tall, weighs over 12 pounds, cast in solid bronze, and produced by the American Fine Arts Foundry in Burbank, California.
SAG Awards have been one of the major awards events in Hollywood since 1995. Nominations for the awards come from 4200 randomly selected members of the union, with the full membership (120,000 as of 2007) available to vote for the winners. The awards have been televised for the past several years on TNT, but now also airs on TBS.
The first SAG Awards aired live on February 25, 1995 from Stage 12, Universal Studios. The second SAG awards aired live from the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, while later awards have been held at the Shrine Exposition Center. Bob Hope was given the first award.
Machair
Machair or machar is a Gàidhlig (Scottish Gaelic) word used to describe a fertile low-lying grassy plain found on some of the north-west coastlines of Ireland and Scotland, in particular the Outer Hebrides. There are machairs in the Isle of Skye, The Isle of Barra, the Isle of Harris and all throughout the west coast and islands.
Max Delbrück
Max Ludwig Henning Delbrück (September 4, 1906 – March 9, 1981) was a German-American biophysicist and Nobel laureate.
Delbrück was one of the most influential people in the movement of physical scientists into biology during the 20th century.
Delbrück's big idea was to explore genetics by means of the bacteriophage viruses which infect bacteria. This was important in the early development of molecular biology.
Delbrück was born in Berlin, German Empire. Trained as a physicist, he got his Ph.D. in 1930. he traveled through England, Denmark, and Switzerland. He met Wolfgang Pauli and Niels Bohr, who got him interested in biology.
In 1937, he moved to the United States to pursue his interests in biology, taking up research in the Biology Division at Caltech on genetics of the fruit fly "Drosophila melanogaster". While at Caltech Delbrück became acquainted with bacteria and their viruses (bacteriophage or 'phage').
Delbrück remained in the US during World War II, teaching physics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville while pursuing his genetic research. In 1942, he and Salvador Luria of Indiana University demonstrated that bacterial resistance to virus infection is caused by random mutation and not adaptive change. This research, known as the Luria-Delbrück experiment, was also significant for its use of mathematics to make quantitative predictions for the results to be expected from alternative models. For that work, they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969, sharing it with Alfred Hershey.
During the 1940s Delbrück developed a course in bacteriophage genetics at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to encourage interest in the field. In 1947, Delbrück returned to Caltech as a professor of biology where he remained until 1977.
Salvador Luria
Salvador Edward Luria (Turin, Italy, August 13, 1912 – Lexington, Massachusetts, February 6, 1991) was an Italian microbiologist.
He won the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his pioneering work with Max Delbrück and Alfred Hershey on phages in molecular biology.
Luria was born Salvatore Edoardo Luria in Turin, Italy to an influential Italian Sephardic Jewish family. He attended the medical school at the University of Turin. There, he met two other future Nobel laureates: Rita Levi-Montalcini and Renato Dulbecco.
In Rome, he was introduced to Max Delbrück's theories on the gene as a molecule and began to formulate methods for testing genetic theory with bacteriophages, which are viruses that infect bacteria.
In 1938, he received a fellowship to study in the United States, where he intended to work with Delbrück. Soon after Luria received the award Benito Mussolini's fascist regime banned Jews from academic research fellowships.
Without funding sources for work in the U.S. or Italy, Luria left his home country for Paris, France in 1938. As the Nazi German armies invaded France in 1940, Luria fled on bicycle to Marseilles where he received an immigration visa to the United States.