said the Denver Post giving a nice overview of vitamin D research. This was just 1 day too early for a fascinating nature immunology paper (scienceblog:doi:10.1038/ni1433:) that links for the first time natural sunlight induced vitamin D action on dendritic cells. Seems that D3 will influence homing of T cells – we are again at “Licht und Leben“, yea, yea.

Addendum

• Don´t miss the nice talk by Dr. Vieth at insinc
• D3 induced Th1 block will allow Th17 action that is credited for causing and sustaining tissue damage
• D3 induces cathelicidin in another study.
• Deutschlandradio reported the vitamin D – allergy story on Feb 10, 2007.

In October 2007, PLoS Medicine together with 100 other journals will publish a special issue devoted to poverty and human development – details are at Gavin Yamey’s blog.

Yesterday I heard for the first time of this psychology term. It describes how humans cope with stress, anger or other negative events – even over long time periods. Some people give up but others still grow (“skipjacks”). Seems that this trait can be immedately tested in scientists ;-) there is even a journal Disaster.

Some of you may remember the fake food hypothesis that relates the obesity epidemic to the introduction of highly processed industrial food. JCI now has a nice review on the satiation signal and the complex system that may be disturbed.
Microbe content might also be important in this context click | click | click, however, even the adoptive transfer might be a secondary effect – everything in biochemistry follows mass equilibrium constants. The poorer resorption in the lean may lead to a different colonialization and vice versa. Will the adoptive transfer really show lasting effects longer than 2 weeks (in the mouse study)? Isn´t colonialization not influenced by diet (in the human study)?

Yea, yea.

I had to manage a system crash this weekend – where even the rescue console did not work. I learned that (1) my old Knoppix CD could neither write to the hard disk nor (2) read access a truecrypt partition. (3) Too late, I should have spent some money on ghost(r) or true image(r)! I further learned on the next day that (4) Bart PE does not work with OEM versions, (5) truecrypt versions are not compatible and (6) a grml iso is not helpful at the system prompt. Ultimately I came across (7) sysresccd that includes

• GParted: partition resize tool
• GNU Parted: a text tool for editing disk partitions
• Partimage: a partition image tool
• Plenty file systems tools allow you to format, resize, and debug an existing partition of your hard disk
• Ntfs3g allows you to mount your partition and get a full read/write access to the NTFS partition
• Sfdisk allows you to backup and restore your partition table

wow, simply a lifesaver.

Last week Science has an update on differential antigen processing by DCs including a key sentence on immature DCs:

Cultured immature DCs capture antigen but only process and present it on MHC II after exposure to inflammatory stimuli or TLR ligation.

Although the authors were not aware of current allergy research, they perfectly summarize how vitamin D renders DC immature, while hygiene (infections or LPS farm exposure ) may antagonize it.