kbonham
Posts by this author
December 11, 2010
The "Science and the Public" story of the year might just be Arsenic using bacteria. Certainly, Alex's critique has been the most popular post on this blog since we started and has received quite a bit of attention from other bloggers as well as in conventional media.
This might be a teachable…
December 8, 2010
Sorry for the radio silence on my part lately. My house got broken into... again... and I'm dealing with the fallout.
I'm thinking about a post on knowledge, where it comes from, what it's good for and if it matters. But before I write it, I'd like to get your input.
What do you think "knowledge…
December 2, 2010
(No pun intended)
This just sucks:
As cholera rampages through Haiti, some epidemiologists are warning that the country could face more than half a million cases over the coming year. Yet tracking and treating the disease is proving increasingly difficult as civil unrest grips the county.
As if…
November 30, 2010
Cancer sucks. I'm sure I don't have to tell you that - it's one of the leading causes of death in developed countries, and our treatment options are pretty thin. Basically, it amounts to cutting out the tumors that can be seen, and then giving a controlled administration of poison in the hopes that…
November 29, 2010
Did you know that bacteria make up 90% of the cells in your body? That they make up ~5% of your mass? That they colonize you at the moment of birth and are different if you were born via c-section than if you were born naturally?
All this and more in the SITN production, "Our Microbial Organ: The…
November 28, 2010
If you've ever rolled your ankle (as I have many times), you have a visceral knowledge of inflammation. Clinically, inflammation is the redness, swelling, heat and pain that's associated with injury. From an immunologist's perspective, it's the set of molecular events that get the immune system…
November 22, 2010
Most of my favorite long-standing discussions with friends and family tend to resolve around definitions. My good friend Paul and I have had hours upon hours of discussion about the nature of the universe - he calls his perception of the order of the universe "god," and I call myself an atheist (…
November 20, 2010
This week, I'm going to take a break from vaccines and do some innate immunity. Today's topic: the provocatively named "Inflammasome." This Nature Review from last month focused on inflammasomes and anti-viral immunity, but I think the inflammasome itself needs its own post.
A breakthrough in our…
November 17, 2010
This is just awesome:
A strain of Escherichia coli bacteria can now solve [sudoku] puzzles
[...]
"Because sudoku has simple rules, we felt that maybe bacteria could solve it for us, as long as we designed a circuit for them to follow," says team leader Ryo Taniuchi.
The mechanism is ingenious and…
November 16, 2010
The last lecture of the Science in the News Fall lecture series is tonight at 7pm in the Armenise amphitheater.
Star Power: New Ways to Harvest Energy From Our Sun
I heard great reviews from people who were at the practice talk, so if you're in the Boston area and interested in alternative energy…
November 13, 2010
Last week, I talked about strategies to improve vaccine efficacy and safety. Most of those strategies were in the context of standard, inject-into-your-arm vaccines, but what about totally new delivery methods? This week, there was a review in PLoS Pathogens of strategies for generating vaccines…
November 12, 2010
Macrophages are really good at gobbling stuff up. It's all right there in the name - they are big (macro) eaters (phage). I study them in the context of the immune system - one of the things they do really well is eat up bacteria and other pathogens that have found their way into your tissues. As a…
November 11, 2010
Ever wonder what exactly a Toxic Asset is? Follow the engaging story of Toxie the toxic asset on This American Life.
This is just the latest in a series of amazing reporting on the financial crisis from a radio show that is not generally concerned with what would be traditionally thought of as "…
November 11, 2010
... the first thing he'll do is start [bubbling?] for revenge:
Alas, this is essentially what the new leaders of congress often sound like.
November 10, 2010
When a paper in Molecular Cell starts with
Science, this very creative human endeavor to understand the nature of the reality that exists independently of ourselves, is impossible. By "impossible," I am not saying "very, very difficult," although it is that, as well.
you just know you're in for a…
November 9, 2010
Normally, I would feel woefully unqualified to analyze a Nature Neuroscience paper, but I'm going to do it anyway. How could I pass it up? It features a Toll-like receptor!
Toll-like receptors are typically expressed in immune cells to regulate innate immunity. We found that functional Toll-like…
November 8, 2010
My house got broken into last week, and then we had a rock thrown through a window a few days later (possibly related). So I had to deal with a bunch of stuff last week, and am still dealing with stuff today, and I need to catch up at work, yada yada yada....
All of which is to say the post I…
November 6, 2010
I think understanding the basics of inheritance is pretty easy for most people - the traits of parents are passed down from parents to offspring. Simple! Humans have known and exploited this fact for thousands of years. When Gregor Mendel came along, he meticulously worked out some mathematical…
November 6, 2010
I have a love/hate relationship with Nature Reviews: Immunology. It comes out once per month, and is usually packed with easy to read articles about fascinating (to me) topics, and each is filled with tons of great references so I can dig into the issue more. On the one hand, I get really excited…
November 5, 2010
Most biological systems have trade-offs, so this really shouldn't come as a surprise. A recent paper published in Science shows that in sheep, some females have a stronger immune system and tend to live longer, but also tend to reproduce less often. This seemed to translate to roughly equal…
November 5, 2010
A few weeks ago, I read an article in Wired talking about an amazing new project led by E.O. Wilson: an all-digital, not-for-profit textbook called Life on Earth. It looks amazing, and it's going to be offered to K-12 schools for free.
Neil Patterson, director of Life on Earth with 50 years of…
November 4, 2010
I started writing this post before I read ERV dissecting some "the immune system is perfect" BS. Go read hers, then come back if you want more.
Now that I've gone through the basics of a typical immune response, I think it's necessary to point out some of its many flaws. In many of the immunology…
November 3, 2010
[I've been hooked on the immune system since I was a kid and my dad showed me electron micrographs of macrophages eating bacteria in Scientific American. Now that I'm in graduate school studying immunology, and macrophages in particular, my dad asked if I could give a play-by-play of an immune…
November 3, 2010
Viruses are tricky buggers - they force their way into another organism's cell and hijack its machienery to utilize for their own nefarious purposes. This is clearly pretty harmful for the host so there's been pretty strong evolutionary pressure to develop ways to stop them or slow them down (hence…
November 3, 2010
If you're in the Boston area, come see me (and two other awesome grad students) give a talk on microbes, especially the ones that live in you and on you.
We've got everything from fecal transplants to whether bacteria can make you fat or not. Come out to Armenise amphitheater at the Harvard Medical…
November 2, 2010
A while back, ERV had a post about the tenuous link between Vitamin D and all sorts of effects on health (and I shamelessly co-opted her title). Then, PalMD dissected the spurious link between Broccoli and cancer. Now it's my turn:
A new study has revealed that naturally occurring chemicals found…
November 2, 2010
[I've been hooked on the immune system since I was a kid and my dad showed me electron micrographs of macrophages eating bacteria in Scientific American. Now that I'm in graduate school studying immunology, and macrophages in particular, my dad asked if I could give a play-by-play of an immune…
November 1, 2010
We beasties came together through our love of microbes, but also through a graduate student group called Science in the News. SITN is completely run by graduate students, and our mission (much like the mission of this blog) is to share our love of science with the general public. We have a lot of…
November 1, 2010
I was there! Not that it was easy. We decided to park in VA (in the parking garage of the National Science foundation - totally by accident) and take the metro in, but evidently the entire world had the same idea; the metro was about a 2 hour wait, and the bus stop had like 3 buses worth of people…
November 1, 2010
[I've been hooked on the immune system since I was a kid and my dad showed me electron micrographs of macrophages eating bacteria in Scientific American. Now that I'm in graduate school studying immunology, and macrophages in particular, my dad asked if I could give a play-by-play of an immune…