Immune system
Category archives for Immune system
Vaccinating Against Semen – Immunity as Contraceptive
Posted by Kevin Bonham on January 18, 2012 I promise, this will be my last semen post for a while. I’ve talked about allergy to semen. I’ve talked about allergens in semen. And I’ve talked about autoimmunity to semen. All of these are problems, leading to discomfort or infertility. But what if those problems could be leveraged for our benefit? [Source: These drawings…
Immunity to Spunk
Posted by Kevin Bonham on January 5, 2012 At the risk of seeming like a one-trick pony, and piggybacking on my recent appearance on the Savage Lovecast, I thought I would close the loop on immune reactions to semen. I’ve already written about allergens being transmitted in semen, and about women having allergies to seminal plasma itself. In the latter case, I say…
Confidential to Savage Lovecast Listeners
Posted by Kevin Bonham on January 3, 2012 In case anyone landed here after listening to this week’s Savage Lovecast, I wanted to point you in the right direction. Please be gentle – that was my first time being interviewed for anything like that, so I was a bit of a nervous wreck. For the uninitiated – a couple of weeks ago on…
Obesity, Inflammation, and Diabetes
Posted by Kevin Bonham on December 21, 2011 This entry is cross posted from the the SITN Flash, a bimonthly publication written and edited by Harvard graduate students. You can find my piece, as well as archives of previous articles written by many graduate students at the Science in the News website. In 1985, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) began tracking the…
Allergies 101: Part the Third
Posted by Kevin Bonham on December 19, 2011 I know this post has been a long time coming. In the first part of this series, I told you that allergies are the result of an immune response against an external, but normally not harmful substance. In part 2, I told you that allergies are the result of a specific type of immune response…
Allergies 101 – Part deux
Posted by Kevin Bonham on November 17, 2011 Earlier this week, I wrote a little bit about what causes allergic symptoms – your immune system confuses pollen (or some other allergen) for a worm, and then arms your granulocytic grenades to explode every time you come into contact with it. But why does this confusion happen? This is a bit more complicated.
Allergies 101
Posted by Kevin Bonham on November 15, 2011 One of my favorite places on the internet is r/askscience, a place on reddit where people come and ask questions, and a panel of scientists answer. People can ask follow-up questions, and there is often some great back-and forth (to be honest, part of the reason I haven’t been writing as much here is because…
That one looks delicious
Posted by Kevin Bonham on October 13, 2011 While researching my recent post on the Nobel Prize, I discovered that the website has a series of “educational productions,” including games and written/illustrated primers on different topics. I’ve been playing the malaria game all morning – you have to fly a mosquito around drinking the blood of humans while avoiding bug spray and mosquito…
A Bitter Sweet Nobel – Beutler, Janeway, and the Dawn of Innate Immunity
Posted by Kevin Bonham on October 6, 2011 Monday’s announcement for the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine should have been a happy occasion for my lab. On the one hand, it was given for early discoveries in the field of innate immunity – my field! On the other hand, it was given to a scientist that many* feel is undeserving of the…
Scientists communicating their science
Posted by Kevin Bonham on September 29, 2011 Christie Wilcox has a great post over at Science Sushi about why scientists should be on social media. I don’t disagree with anything she says, and I try to do it myself (see: the twitter and G+ links to the left… I also recently signed up for tumblr which is kind of fun). But sometimes…
