Butterfly Book Like No Other

Supercritical carbon dioxide: a solvent like no other

Supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO2) could be one aspect of a significant and necessary movement towards green chemistry, being a potential replacement for volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Unfortunately, carbon dioxide has a notoriously poor solubilising power and is famously difficult to handle. This review examines attempts and breakthroughs in enhancing the physicochemical properties of ca...

Biatrial myxoma floating like a butterfly

Rationale:Myxoma is the most common type of primary benign cardiac tumor in adults. The left atrium is the most frequent site of origin followed by the right atrium. Biatrial myxoma is extremely rare. Patient concerns: We present a case of a 60-year-old woman with biatrial myxoma, who presented with palpitations for one month. Diagnoses: Echocardiography revealed an irregular homogeneous mass i...

Book Review: No Place To Hide

This is no time to be a butterfly

Sending neural stem cells back to the garage In the brain’s hippocampus, which modulates memories and emotions, neural stem cells generate new neurons, even during adulthood. How many new neurons are generated, and when, follows from the balance between quiescence and proliferation in the pool of neural stem cells. Urbán et al. asked what signals send proliferating stem cells back into a quiesc...

No genomic mosaicism in a putative hybrid butterfly species.

Recent descriptions of hybrid animal species have spurred interest in this phenomenon, but little genomic data exist to support it. Here, we use frequency variation for 657 amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) markers and DNA sequence variation from 16 genes to determine whether the genome of Heliconius pachinus, a suspected hybrid butterfly species, is a mixture of the putative parent...