What we're talking about 
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Malaria and the Inner Armies
GMO bacteria vs malaria
erv July 18, 2012
WARBLEGARBLE!!! Fighting malaria with engineered symbiotic bacteria from vector mosquitoes. Malaria kills 1.24 million people a year. Mostly babies under 5 years old. Malaria is becoming resistant to our drugs. We cant figure out how to make an anti-malarial vaccine. We can make GMO mosquitoes that are resistant to carrying malaria, but we dont know…
Researchers, Jacobs-Lorena et al., at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have altered a harmless bacteria (Pantoea agglomerans) naturally found in the midgut of mosquitos to fight malaria by producing and releasing proteins that are toxic to malaria but harmless to mosquitos or humans. Since the gut is where the malaria parasite reproduces,…
The Surprising Viruses in Our Gut
The Weizmann Wave July 17, 2012
We were just getting used to the idea of our digestive tract as an ecosystem. There are 10 times as many bacteria in our gut as there are cells in our bodies, and the ecological balance between the different types might affect everything from our tendency to gain weight to our general health and susceptibility…
Channel Surfing
Life Science
The NY Times is touting a computer simulation of Mycoplasma genitalium, the proud possesor of the simplest known genome. It’s a rather weird article because of the combination of hype, peculiar emphases, and cluelessness about what a simulation entails, and it bugged me. It is not a complete simulation — I don’t even know what…
Dr. Sally Ride is reported to have died today after a long battle with cancer. She was 61. Ride was the first American woman to go into outer space, and the youngest at the time, at age 32. She was also a pioneer in STEM promotion, and a prolific author.
Not joking. Researchers have managed to take cells from a rat and add them to a silicone layer to form a synthetic jellyfish that moves much like the real thing. The hope is to develop more complex organs that might be used for organ transplants in the future.
Physical Science
You’ve heard of the carbon cycle, maybe even the nitrogen cycle. But have you given much thought lately to the sulfur cycle? New research in last week’s Science suggests that we should be paying a bit more attention to the way this element moves through the atmosphere, biosphere, oceans and land. Over the last 500…
“Each generation goes further than the generation preceding it because it stands on the shoulders of that generation. You will have opportunities beyond anything we’ve ever known.” -Ronald Reagan Earlier today, Sally Ride, the first American woman ever to fly in outer space, passed away at the age of 61 from pancreatic cancer. To many…
“The achievements of Apollo were so bold and our subsequent efforts so timid that the energy of those years seems like a youthful dream.” -Buzz Aldrin 43 years ago today, humanity took our first steps on another world, venturing nearly 400,000 kilometers from home and walking on the surface of the Moon. Of course, what…
Environment
You’ve heard of the carbon cycle, maybe even the nitrogen cycle. But have you given much thought lately to the sulfur cycle? New research in last week’s Science suggests that we should be paying a bit more attention to the way this element moves through the atmosphere, biosphere, oceans and land. Over the last 500…
Revealing the location of the hydrofracking operations where the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health found levels of respirable silica at 10-100 times above the recommended safety limits is important to the health of those who have worked at those sites or others like them.
Gun violence is uniquely an American problem compared to other industrialized countries. Firearm-related fatality rates in the U.S. are four times the rates in other industrially advanced countries. We continue to relegate this social ill it to our criminal justice system when it needs a public health solution.
Humanities
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Rolling Stones’s first gig, at the Marquee Club in London. Journalist Hanspeter Kuenzler and Bavarian e-book publishers The eBook People GmbH celebrate the occasion with a massive illustrated two-volume biographical anthology in English on the band. Counting the pages in an e-book is of course difficult. But…
The Pump Handle
House Republicans say the heck with black lung disease, have a coal miner postage stamp instead
While investigative reporters are exposing the plague of black lung disease in U.S. coal miners, the best Members of Congress are willing to do is ask for a postage stamp commemorating the American Coal Miner.
Via Andrew Sullivan, we have this interesting essay, by Jacob Weisberg, discussing why Mitt Romney is struggling to defend his history at Bain Capital. The whole essay is worth reading, but I especially liked this part: Romney’s Bain career is a story about rising inequality. It’s telling that George Romney, Mitt’s father, made around $200,000…
Education
“Each generation goes further than the generation preceding it because it stands on the shoulders of that generation. You will have opportunities beyond anything we’ve ever known.” -Ronald Reagan Earlier today, Sally Ride, the first American woman ever to fly in outer space, passed away at the age of 61 from pancreatic cancer. To many…
Louisiana is preparing to spend over $11 million to send 1,365 students to 20 private schools that teach creationism instead of science as part of Governor Bobby Jindal’s new voucher program. It is time to halt the implementation of this creationist voucher program. It is increasingly clear that one of Governor Jindal’s primary education goals…
Remember I told you that New Society Publishers, in honor of the forthcoming _Making Home_ would sponsor a spot in my Adapting-in-Place Class, in exchange for someone offering up a weekly blog post about what it is like to take the course. Well, here’s the first installment – it will go up at New Society’s…
Politics
The polite way to describe my opinion of the Humane Society of the United states is ‘Im not a fan‘. For those of you who are unaware, HSUS has absolutely nothing to do with ‘the Humane Society’ that rescues animals in your community. HSUS has nothing to do with rescuing animals at all– they give…
Here’s Texas Republican representative Louie Gohmert explaining the cause of the killings at that Colorado movie theater: Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said Friday that the shootings that took place in an Aurora, Colo. movie theater hours earlier were a result of “ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs” and questioned why nobody else in the theater had…
Legislative attacks on women’s health care are so commonplace these days that they make proposals that don’t include a state-mandated vaginal probe seem moderate. In fact, so many legislators are introducing proposals under the guise of protecting women’s health, that it was pretty refreshing to read how the Affordable Care Act will actually protect women’s health. Like, for real.
Medicine
Not joking. Researchers have managed to take cells from a rat and add them to a silicone layer to form a synthetic jellyfish that moves much like the real thing. The hope is to develop more complex organs that might be used for organ transplants in the future.
Domesticating wild organisms– Whether its domesticating teosinte or aurochs, bending wild organisms to our will is always a game-changing event in human history. The domestication of viruses is no exception. We now live in a world where small-pox, a virus that once wiped out entire continents, is now functionally extinct. Generations of people see iron…
Legislative attacks on women’s health care are so commonplace these days that they make proposals that don’t include a state-mandated vaginal probe seem moderate. In fact, so many legislators are introducing proposals under the guise of protecting women’s health, that it was pretty refreshing to read how the Affordable Care Act will actually protect women’s health. Like, for real.
Brain & Behavior
Long held to be the window to the soul, research published today in PLoS shows that the eyes are not the tell-tale Achilles heel of liars, despite what as NLP practitioners, Hollywood and innumerable armchair mentalists would have you believe. Snip: For decades many NLP practitioners have claimed that when a person looks up to…
In a prior blog, we talked about different animals that are able to sense the Earth’s magnetic field. The mystery of how fish, and perhaps other animals, do this may be solved. Animals use the magnetic field like a compass. This is an important skill especially to migratory species who don’t have the benefit of Google…
Every now and then a news story comes along that makes me want to repost this particular thing I wrote a long time ago. And it has happened again. First, the news story: National Geographic Channel has run a poll in which they found that 36% of Americans “believe UFO’s exist.” This is in line…
Technology
View from the ISS at Night from Knate Myers on Vimeo.
Not joking. Researchers have managed to take cells from a rat and add them to a silicone layer to form a synthetic jellyfish that moves much like the real thing. The hope is to develop more complex organs that might be used for organ transplants in the future.
Dropbox is still the best way for most users to store their files on multiple computers and in “the cloud” in part because it is system agnostic and not linked to a corporate entity that has other plans for you. And, using Dropbox you can share files pretty easily as well. However, there is another…
Information Science
Academics aren’t exactly known for their sartorial splendor. And that may be the understatement of the year. A fun article by Daniel J. Myers in Insider Higher Ed from a few weeks ago: Faculty Fashion Here’s a quote: What message might academics be trying to send when they flout the dictates of fashion and good…
Confessions of a Science Librarian
From the Archives: Interview with Michael Morgan of Morgan & Claypool
I’m on my annual summer hiatus for the month of July so I’ll be only publishing my weekly Friday Fun posts as well as re-posting some of the interviews I did a few years ago on the old blog with people from the publishing, library and science worlds. Not that my posting of late has…
Confessions of a Science Librarian
Friday Fun: Dubstep is “extra-terrestrial communication” NASA scientists reveal
This one is from the “kids today” file: Dubstep is “extra-terrestrial communication” NASA scientists reveal My musical tastes are pretty catholic, but I gotta admit i don’t get electronic music. NASA today revealed that interstellar communications from an alien lifeform have been mistakenly interpreted as music, spawning a new sub-genre known as ‘Dubstep’. *snip* But…
Jobs
The Pump Handle
Houston, we have a workers’ rights problem: Profile of a worker justice center in Texas’ biggest city
Last month, more than 70 ironworkers walked off an ExxonMobil construction site near Houston, Texas. The workers, known as rodbusters in the industry, weren’t members of a union or backed by powerful organizers; they decided amongst themselves to unite in protest of unsafe working conditions in a state that has the highest construction worker fatality rate in the country.
Come work instead of me! Below is a posting for a 3-year contractually limited appointment in my unit. I’m chair of the search committee, so feel free to ask away with any questions about the position. I’ll answer them to the best of my ability given the limitations of being on the committee. As it…
A small non-profit concerned with climate change is seking a “Climate Wiki Intern” which sounds very interesting. Knowing that many of my readers would be very good at this, It thought it was worth a blog post to point you in this direction:
