Tara C. Smith
Associate Professor, lab rat (microbiologist/infectious disease epidemiologist) and occasional blogger, full-time nerd.
tsmith
Posts by this author
For the Iowa folks, the Iowa Secularists will be featuring a discussion of intelligent design (""The Wedge Strategy: How Intelligent Design threatens secularism") at their Annual Conference. The conference will be held July 15 in Johnston, Iowa; more information at the link.
(For those…
Antibiotic resistance gets a lot of attention, but it's not the only kind of drug resistance that's of concern. Derek of In the Pipeline has a post up discussing resistance to cancer therapies.
A friend of mine is riding this weekend in the MS 150 bike tour in Minnesota. This is an annual event that raises money for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, which works both to fund research into the disease and to serve people who've been diagnosed. I've never tackled the bike tour (150…
If you ever have a few minutes to kill and need someplace interesting to go on the web, the NIH's National Library of Medicine has a ton of interesting stuff. That's where I found the this reference from the early 1900s on raising children. I ran across another gem--a manuscript from 1721 written…
You may recall the exploding Mentos and diet coke experiment I mentioned awhile back. Wanna see some people with way too much time on their hands take it to the extreme? Check it out at EepyBird.com.
Hat tip to Burt Humburg
This week's Grand Rounds, a carnival o' medblogging, is up over at The Medical Blog Network. A few notables:
Dr. Deborah Serani discusses the benefits of naps; Mylifemypace on how marriage affects a scientific career; the Health Business blog on how George Bush is a louse enabler (OK, or on how No…
Once again, I'm wrong. I said yesterday that HIV deniers accused scientists of thinking of Robert Gallo as a deity. Silly, silly me--my mistake. Turns out he's just a high preist:
We point to this phenomenon of how easily religious belief triumphs over the most irrefutable evidence to the…
This one snuck up on me (so I forgot to sumbit anything), but check out the latest edition of the Pediatric Grand Rounds blog carnival over at Anxiety, Addiction and Depression Treatments.
Yesterday, the New York Times op-ed by John Moore and Nicoli Nattrass discussing denial of HIV. They also featured an article suggesting that more human-to-human transmission of H5N1 has occurred than previously thought.
Liam Scheff has now turned his attention from HIV to avian influenza, with predictable results. Analysis below...
Scheff's self-stated goal is to "...review some of the bright and shiny inconsistencies that have come into view on the bird flu." However, he's not exactly consistent himself,…
Animalcules will return June 15th, but I have a slight glitch--I can't contact the host. So Tala, if you're reading, can you drop me an email? Otherwise, I can just host it here again. In the interim, feel free to send submissions to me as well. If you have more than one, even better, since…
Janet has already mentioned this, but I know I have a number of artistic readers here, so take note:
Teaming up with leading editorial and strip cartoonists, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) today announced an editorial cartoon contest to draw attention to political interference in science.…
Via Science magazine's NetWatch:
If you know a thing or two about animal behavior, remote sensing, pollution, or related topics, you might want to contribute a chapter to the nascent Encyclopedia of Earth. Bucking the trend toward user-written--but sometimes inaccurate--content, the environmental…
More interesting stuff I didn't get to...
First, outbreak news that I've not had a chance to write about. A huge cholera outbreak is ongoing in Angola; meanwhile, a small measles outbreak has been reported in Boston.
Invasive bullfrogs may be spreading around the deadly chytrid fungus that has…
I forgot to mention this before it aired, but earlier this week PBS aired a two-part documentary on HIV, The Age of AIDS. It's very good, and according to the website, you can watch it online beginning at 5PM EST today. There's also a lot of information, interviews, etc. on the PBS website linked…
John Hawks highlights a new article in today's Science, Metagenomic Analysis of the Human Distal Gut Microbiome. This goes nicely with the posts here recently on the topic of how our microbes affect our health and weight (part I; part II). A bit of discussion of the new article below...
First, I…
Color me shocked: Teens who promise to wait for marriage more likely to deny sexual history
Teenagers who take pledges to remain virgins until marriage are likely to deny having taken the pledge if they later become sexually active. Conversely, those who were sexual active before taking the pledge…
I'm still not really here (child is feeling better, but have childcare issues today), so in the meantime, I'll point you over to the "justify my funds" roundup at Stochastic.
One other housekeeping issue--several of you have commented that TypeKey wasn't recognizing me as being signed up with…
It can't be said often enough that "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." Moving from physical characteristics--color, bone shape, the form of bacterial cells--to genetic characteristics in order to classify organisms--and infer phylogenies--was a giant advance.…
Just in time for college graduations comes a new book, "100 Science words every college graduate should know." It's an interesting browse. Others have mentioned it (and Chad even did a pretty nice breakdown of words by discipline); I just thought I'd add my two cents.
From the introduction,…
I'm dealing with my own little epidemic (daughter managed to catch the stomach bug that's been going around her school, meaning she has to miss her last day as a kindergartener, poor thing). I found one post in the queue that I forgot to publish earlier in the month, so today won't be completely…
You've probably seen this floating around the other Seed blogs this week:
Since they're funded by taxpayer dollars (through the NIH, NSF, and so on), should scientists have to justify their research agendas to the public, rather than just grant-making bodies?
I'm late to the game, but like others,…
Busy today, so sequels are on tap. There's an interesting story from Nature news that's a nice follow-up to this recent post on how microbes can influence weight. More after the jump.
Scientists have identified a key microbe in our guts that helps us glean more calories from food. The discovery…
Leftover from last week's zoonotic diseases course: I do sometimes get away from the hind end of animals.
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A new Grand Rounds is up over at KidneyNotes. Check out what's happened this week in the medical blogosphere.
I was heading out, but first I just want to point y'all over to this excellent post of Janet's regarding women and "nerd culture".
Now I'm really leaving...
As pointed out yesterday, flu blogging has been light this month, even though there have been interesting developments. As such, to catch up a bit, I'm posting an overview of the current Indonesian cluster and some other thoughts below the jump...
As always, I point anyone who wants to keep up-to-…
Species of the bacterium Clostridium have long been a scourge of humans. They are gram-positive, spore-forming bacteria that can be found in the soil around all of us. The spores then germinate when exposed to anaerobic conditions.
Clostridium botulinum is the cause of botulism, a serious and…
I write a lot on here about evolution, and more about epidemiology. A recent article in Emerging Infectious Diseases discusses a unique combination of the two: 2,500-year Evolution of the Term Epidemic. I've said before that I'm about the farthest thing from a language scholar you can find, but…
Find it over at Skeptico; it's been taken over by Skeptico's doppleganger. Hilarity ensues.