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Intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells

Hey, I'm responding to the recent item you left on my talk page.

If I'm an "expert" on anything, it's being equally thin on more than one dimension at the same time: my mind is a vast porcupine web of horizontal needles admixed with an equal measure vertical needles. I'm a congenital drillettante: a dilettante minus a working gyroscope.

The IPRG cells are certainly components of the visual system.

Their functional roles are non-image-forming and fundamentally different from those of pattern vision; they provide a stable representation of ambient light intensity.

I saw a claim by a prominent sleep researcher not long ago that blue light received through the skin can also affect circadian phase. It was kind of throw out there, without any substantiation, so I didn't take it entirely seriously; but I did make a mental note to notice whether this claim crops up elsewhere.

This function certainly doesn't need to be located in the eye. It just needs reliable exposure to light. We don't have many transparent tissues in the human body. I suppose this function could be located under the fingernails, but for two problems: distal parts of the body are sometime sacrificial (it would be less robust), and the hands are often enclosed in pockets (at least six months of the year where I was born). Likewise with the ear canal.

The visual system needs to monitor ambient light for pupillary control, and the eyes don't work well when excessively shielded (I spent a fair amount of my childhood squinting through ice-crystals forming in my toque eye slits—it can almost be done). It would be hard to imagine circadian regulation not hitching a ride at this most convenient place.

One could argue that circadian regulation itself almost deserves to be regarded as a part of the visual system: we track night and day for the in large measure for the sake of synchronizing our wakefulness with optimal seeing conditions. In an ecosystem, once one predatory organism begins to do this, even the blind must follow (especially if they are considered tasty).

Biologists Robert Sapolsky and Lisa Share have followed a troop of wild baboons in Kenya for over 20 years, starting in 1978. Sapolsky and Share called them “The Garbage Dump Troop” because they got much of their food from a garbage pit at a tourist lodge. But not every baboon was allowed to eat from the pit in the early 1980s: The aggressive, high status males in the troop refused to allow lower status males, or any females, to eat the garbage.

That actual quote follows what happens when all the alpha-male assholes die off eating after eating too much infected meat. A different version (one I couldn't find again later) talks about how difficult it is for a troop not to partake in the Trojan feast while a mortal-enemy troop gets fat and aggressive. Do the enlightened refusniks manage to survive long enough to enjoy watching their gluttony nemesis cut down to size by diabetes and infected meat?

The visual system has this kind of clout on the entire ecosystem. Like the nuclear bomb, one ignores the visual capabilities of one's competitors at great peril. Once you frame the visual system in its role as a survival mechanism (surely an alpha-dog in the game-theoretic matrix of evolution), it quickly becomes clear why its so difficult to cleanly dissect in functional terms.

That was a horizontal needle. If you want to continue this discussion in the vertical direction, drop me another note on my talk page. — MaxEnt 19:19, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Circadian rhythm, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Hypoxia. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

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I'll say thanks again, tho surely no one will read this. I can't imagine anyone being stupid enough to opt out of this valuable service. --Hordaland (talk) 11:40, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Medical Translation Newsletter Aug./Sept. 2014

Medical Translation Newsletter
Issue 2, Aug./Sept. 2014
by CFCF

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Feature – Ebola articles

Electron micrograph of an Ebola virus virion

During August we have translated Disease and it is now live in more than 60 different languages! To help us focus on African languages Rubric has donated a large number of articles in languages we haven't previously reached–so a shout out them, and Ian Henderson from Rubric who's joined us here at Wikipedia. We're very happy for our continued collaboration with both Rubric and Translators without Borders!

Just some of our over 60 translations:
New roles and guides!

At Wikimania there were so many enthusiastic people jumping at the chance to help out the Medical Translation Project, but unfortunately not all of them knew how to get started. That is why we've been spending considerable time writing and improving guides! They are finally live, and you can find them at our home-page!

New sign up page!

We're proud to announce a new sign up page at WP:MTSIGNUP! The old page was getting cluttered and didn't allow you to speficy a role. The new page should be easier to sign up to, and easier to navigate so that we can reach you when you're needed!

Style guides for translations

Translations are of both full articles and shorter articles continues. The process where short articles are chosen for translation hasn't been fully transparent. In the coming months we hope to have a first guide, so that anyone who writes medical or health articles knows how to get their articles to a standard where they can be translated! That's why we're currently working on medical good lede criteria! The idea is to have a similar peer review process to good article nominations, but only for ledes.

Some more stats
Further reading


-- CFCF 🍌 (email) 13:09, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

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