kbonham
Posts by this author
November 1, 2010
It is an honor and a privilege to be joining ScienceBlogs. Many of the first blogs that I ever read were on this network, and the efforts of PZ, ERV and Orac (among others) to communicate science directly from the lab to readers was in large part what motivated me to start blogging myself. I love…
October 18, 2010
This post was originally published at webeasties.wordpress.com
Have you noticed the recent spate of people coming down with terrifying bacterial infections contracted at Apple stores? Yeah, me neither. Still:
A leading Australian expert in infectious diseases says people who use display iPads and…
October 7, 2010
[This post was originally published at webeasties.wordpress.com]
Most papers I read these days are long. Nature and Science papers tend to have 3-4 figures (Cell and Immunity papers can be twice that), tons of supplementary data and are at least a couple pages of dense, science-speak prose. I think…
October 1, 2010
[This post was originally published at webeasties.wordpress.com]
The best defense against pathogens is to never let them gain access to our delicious, gooey insides. Our skin is pretty good for this purpose: it's pretty tough and mostly impermeable, and the only way most of our surface tissues can…
September 14, 2010
[This post was originally published at webeasties.wordpress.com]
Back in July I wrote about an editorial published in Nature about the future of science communication and what place blogs had in that future. Though I agreed with them that blogs are a great resource, I also thought that they were…
September 3, 2010
[This post was originally published at webeasties.wordpress.com]
Antibiotics are awesome. They can be credited with saving more human life than any other invention and have been one of the best advancements in public health second only (maybe) to sanitation. But, as with all things pathogen related…
August 19, 2010
[This post was originally published at webeasties.wordpress.com]
I've played video games most of my life. Starting with Tom Sawyer's Island and Matterhorn Screamer (both released in 1988), the early Final Fantasies and Secret of Mana  on Super Nintendo in middleschool, games like Starcraft and…
July 8, 2010
[This post was originally published at webeasties.wordpress.com]
A while back I heard an NPR story about bacteria growing in reusable grocery bags, and now there's a piece from WaPo's health blog about bacteria fround on 3-D glasses you get at movie theaters:
In its July issue, Good Housekeeping…
June 30, 2010
[This post was originally published at webeasties.wordpress.com]
Considering the forum, you can probably guess my answer, but it seems the editors at Nature agree... sort of:
Institutions need to recognize and to encourage such outreach explicitly -- not just as a matter of routine, but…
June 28, 2010
[This post was originally published at webeasties.wordpress.com]
The intestine is probably the most difficult organ for the immune system to deal with. First of all, it's huge (the surface area of the small intestine alone is about the same as a tennis court). Second, it's filled with microbes that…
June 23, 2010
[This post was originally published at webeasties.wordpress.com on]
As I've noted before, our bodies are riddled with microbes - there are more of them than there are of us (if you go by shear number). But where do they come from? Each individual has a complex ecosystem of commensal (harmless)…
March 27, 2010
[This article was originally posted at webeasties.wordpress.com]
About 4 years ago, I went to a seminar at TSRI that convinced me that cancer would be over in relatively short order. The man speaking (I wish I could remember who it was) showed that his group had been able to target radioactive…