What we're talking about Wednesday, March 16, 2016

New Research Sheds Light on Zika

Over the past few weeks, new published research has provided more evidence linking Zika virus to poor health outcomes

It’s well understood in science education that students are more engaged when they work on problems that matter. Right now, Zika virus matters. Zika is a very scary problem that matters a great deal to anyone who might want to start a family and greatly concerns my students. I teach a bioinformatics course where students use…

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last decade-plus of blogging about medicine and alternative medicine, it’s that any time there is an outbreak or pandemic of infectious disease, there will inevitably follow major conspiracy theories about it. It happened during the H1N1 pandemic in the 2009-2010 influenza season, the Ebola outbreak in late…

Scientists working to understand the implications of Zika's new prevalence in the Americas have found strong evidence that infection with the virus can cause fetal abnormalities or even miscarriage in pregnant women. On The Pump Handle, Liz Borkowski examines a series of studies conducted on Zika, including one which found the virus infected "most of the cortical neuron progenitors, which form the brain’s cortex" more quickly than other types of stem cell. This may be how the virus causes microcephaly. On Discovering Biology in a Digital World, Sandra Porter leads a hunt for potential drugs against Zika by looking at the molecular level, comparing known drugs to the protein structures of the virus. And on Respectful Insolence, Orac questions whether DDT could play a role in fighting the outbreak.

Channel Surfing

rss

Life Science

The latest National Geographic Roundtable Question: Survivor-style television has grown increasingly popular over the years and done a great job of illustrating our brain’s fascinating built-in survival instinct. What role do you think our ancestral instincts play today in helping us survive, thrive and accomplish our goals? How much of our ancestral survival instincts are…

A guy finds a hole in his wall, and behind it, a strange leathery brown mass. He pulls it out — first mistake. He cuts it open — second mistake. Within… It’s a wasp nest stuffed full of dead spiders, each with an egg planted in them. It’s just adorable. There are more photos. I…

In a new study published in The Auk, scientists report that well-fueled older tiny Ruby-throated Hummingbirds (Archilochus colubris) might be capable of non-stop flights of over 4,000 kilometers, wind conditions permitting. They made this remarkable observation while studying birds from 2010-2014 as the animals made stopovers at a wildlife refuge during their annual migration to South America. In general, older birds not only…

rss

Physical Science

“In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.” -Terry Pratchett Quantum mechanics has been described as the spookiest of all the sciences, since it’s by far the most…

In a validation of Albert Einstein’s genius, the power of new technology, and the relevance of the scientific method (even if it takes a century), scientists working on a project called LIGO have witnessed ripples in the fabric of spacetime caused by gravitational waves. First predicted by Einstein in 1916 on the basis of general…

Spring break has ended. It is a great sadness. But that means that POTW can now return! Life is full of tradeoffs.

rss

Environment

This week’s snapshot of just one work-related fatality in the US. This one occurred on Friday, March 4 in McCalla, AL.

More soon, but I can finally show you pictures of my whole family. We celebrated the adoption of Deniece, Rimonah, Judah, Malkiah and Hezekiah yesterday, to our incredible joy! I have professional pictures coming, and will do good ones of each individual child, but here’s the best one of the whole family so far. Thanks…

But it still tastes sour. Perhaps it needs more time to mature? Rushing half-fermented stuff out is not good. What’s in, what’s out? Well, who can possibly be bothered to read and compare them line by line? Certainly not me. Certainly not any of the commentators at Eli’s. Prove me wrong if you like: new…

rss

Humanities

One of the surest signs of the imminent arrival of spring is the appearance of these little purple flowers in our back yard in large bunches. I have no idea what they are, but they’re kind of photogenic, so… Having spent much too long on the Internet, I can just about convince myself that this…

rss

Education

A special thank you to reader Dr. Barbara Goodman, Professor of Physiology at Sanford School of Medicine of the University of South Dakota who sent me a story from The Scientist about sleep in animals complete with footage of a dolphin that was seen apparently “sleeping” (video posted on YouTube): Why do animals sleep? This is a question with many…

In a new study published in Physiological Genomics, researchers explored the role of genetics in the conformation of Tennessee Walking Horses. In other words, how close each animal they sampled looked to an “ideal” Tennessee Walking Horse. According to Kylee Jo Duberstein (Department of Animal and Dairy Science, University of Georgia), there are five criteria that are examined…

rss

Politics

You all know about Freethoughtblog.com . Many of the bloggers at FTB.com, and some others, have formed a new blog network, called “The Orbit.” Kudos for coming up with a new name for a blog network, that’s hard to do. Anyway, here is the press release announcing the new network. Enjoy: The Orbit: Atheist Social…

I’m starting this post before any primary results are in, and I’ll add the outcome of the primaries below, where I will also compare the results to my predictions and discuss what I think this means for the overall process of the Democratic primaries. But first, I wanted to get some thoughts down to contextualize…

Although the US still has a long way to go in preventing unintended pregnancies, an article published earlier this month in the New England Journal of Medicine had some good news: The proportion of US pregnancies that were unintended dropped from 51% in 2008 to 45% in 2011.

rss

Medicine

Rotavirus vaccine is very effective in preventing this diarrhea inducing stomach illness in children in developed countries. But it appears that in certain poorer regions, i.e. Bangladesh, the same vaccine has a reduced effect, inducing sufficient immunity in fewer than half of the children who receive it. In the early days of the polio vaccine,…

I write about homeopathy fairly regularly on this blog because there is no quackery that is (1) so obviously quackery and (2) such a perfect topic to use to illustrate a lot of issues relevant to medical science, such as issues in clinical trials resulting in false positives and, of course, placebo effects. Basically, homeopathy…

One of the most pernicious lies promoted by the antivaccine movement is a trope that I’ve labeled the “toxins gambit.” Basically, it’s the lie, oft repeated in hysterical terms, that there are all sorts of horrible toxic chemicals in vaccines, and it is those toxic substances that are responsible for the claimed adverse effects of…

rss

Brain & Behavior

Is this science writer jazzed that ninth-grade girls from a religious girls’ school in Jerusalem won a space/science contest? You bet your sweet solar-powered spacelab she is! It is not just that these girls beat out a lot of other classes (over 400), or that they break more than one stereotype. They also came up…

Using computed tomography (CT) scans of an intact skull, researchers have discovered that extinct dodo birds (Raphus cucullatus), despite having a rather silly name, were actually pretty smart. Well, as smart as a pigeon at least, and pigeons are pretty smart. Dodos likely also had a good sense of smell based on measurements of the olfactory portion…

rss

Technology

For the chess fans, the big candidates tournament begins in Moscow tomorrow. Eight of the top players in the world will be competing for the chance to face Magnus Carlsen in a match for the title. As it happens, the US has two representatives: Fabiano Caruana and Hikaru Nakamura. Going strictly by ratings, they are…

In the U.S., just a tiny fraction of the chemicals used in consumer products have been tested for human health effects. And with the current climate in Congress, it feels unlikely that we’ll see any true reform of the nation’s terribly outdated chemical safety rules anytime soon. In the meantime, scientist Thomas Hartung may have created the next best thing.

On 2 February 2006 I took delivery of my first smartphone, or handdator as I called it in my diary – “hand computer”. On the following day I got the machine on-line. It was a Qtek 9100, with a slide-out mechanical keyboard that I still really miss, a tiny screen, a stylus and a crappy…

rss

Information Science

Yeah, you have to figure good old Indy wasn’t much of an academic colleague. Too flashy, never around to sit on a search committee, never willing to take his turn as chair, always blowing up the wrong building or disrupting the wrong classroom. And then there’s the ghosts and arcs and demons and what not.…

The controversy about Sci-Hub is raging in the halls of scholarship and academic publishing. What’s the story, in a nutshell? Sci-Hub is a Russian website that has used donated institutional login credentials to harvest tens of millions of academic articles and has posted them on their site, free to access and read for everyone. This…

rss

Jobs

This week’s snapshot of just one work-related fatality in the US. This one occurred on Friday, March 4 in McCalla, AL.

A painter named Jason, who nearly died from using a methylene chloride-based paint stripper, teams up with the California Department of Public Health to make the case for using safer alternatives.

It seems obvious that workers with paid sick leave are more likely to stay home and seek out medical care when they or a family member is ill. But it’s always good to confirm a hunch with some solid data.