Unscientific Art

Found on BoingBoing.
"Science painter Cornelia Hesse-Honegger collects and paints mutant bugs in the vicinity of irradiated wastelands like Chernorbyl, around nuclear plants, and nuclear refining sites."
Here is a link to the title page of this work.
Awesome paintings of messed up bugs. Too bad that's pretty much all it is, and claims that the observed mutant phenotype of the insects has something to do with radiation from nuclear power plants is probably just to attract some attention to the great artwork.
I love entomology and genetics so otherwise this would have been really cool with some statistics and some controls.

Autophagy and Radiation Resistance

Autophagy is a cellular process that involves the lysosomal degradation of macromolecules or organelles within the cell. It plays a role in cellular homeostasis, response to infection and potentially as a cell death mechanism. Autophagy has also been shown to be activated in tumour cells after cancer treatment, but whether autophagy is playing a role in survival or death in this context is unclear.

A recent paper in Cancer Research explores the role of autophagy in cancer. They find that irradiation of cancer cells induced autophagy-related genes and accumulation of autophagosomes and that downregulation of some of these genes sensitized resistant cell lines to radiation. This suggests a survival role for autophagy in radiation-resistant cell lines, though the authors note that "the inhibition of autophagy in cancer cells may vary dependent on the type of cancer, individual characteristics of cancer cells, microenvironments, and therapeutic treatment." However other studies have shown that suppression of autophagy enhances tumorigenesis. In spite of this, inhibition of autophagy combined with radiation may be a viable treatment strategy provided the proper cancer-types and conditions can be determined, as well as the proper target (SirT1?).

The incredible hulk has a small dick

There has been anecdotal evidence that radiation can cause penile lenght shortening. Now it's been confirmed, the combination of androgen therapy and radiation in prostate cancer patients can not only cause impotence but also a shortening of the penis from 14.2 cm to 8.6cm (p<0.001). This is from the same group that brought you the elctrifying research on a very unusual intravesical foreign body in a male : "We present a case of a battery as foreign body in the bladder in a 36-year-old man. Many kinds of foreign bodies in the bladder have been reported but to our knowledge this is the first case of a battery. The diagnosis and the treatment of the case is discussed."