terrasig
Posts by this author
Here's a quick note that might belong best in Orac's weekly feature, Your Friday Dose of Woo.
The Scientist reports today on a report released by the UK-based group of scientists called Sense About Science. The group has been challenging dietary supplement manufacturers about their scientific-…
The Southland is all abuzz today following yesterday's Charlotte Observer article by Lisa Zagaroli that members of the US House Homeland Security Committee were advised to get vaccinations (for hepatitis A, hepatitis B, tetanus, diphtheria and influenza) before traveling to car races in Concord, NC…
[Aufmerksamkeit! Begrüßen Sie deutsche Freunde und Leser des Focus Wissenschafts-Community. Glückwünsche zu Profs Ertl und Grünberg auf dieser enormen Ehre!]
I'm intentionally being dramatic but an interesting discussion emerged in the comment thread of my post on the work of Germany's Gerhard Ertl…
Clean(er) car exhaust, the ability to make fertilizer from nitrogen in the air, and the promise of hydrogen fuel cells are among the practical applications of the surface, or solid state, chemistry methods elucidated by this year's winner, Prof Gerhard Ertl, of Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-…
The monthly Denver mag, 5280, made its way to Chez Pharmboy last week with a very familiar face staring back - and not because I've had a cardiac cath...yet!
w00t!
For our readers in the Queen City of the Plains, read more here about your favorite cardiologist.
This morning, Drs Mario R. Capecchi, Martin J. Evans, and Oliver Smithies were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries of "principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells."
The technology for homologous…
Via Clinical Cases and Images, I just learned that Mark Rabnett at the University of Manitoba has just compiled a comprehensive list of medical student bloggers.
No one source is complete, so I hope this list will be of help to the fevered mind that cannot rest until every blogging student in the…
I've got to admit that I've really enjoyed reading Health Blog from the Wall Street Journal. Short, pithy, and great bites about health/pharma stories that make it into one of the best sources for news in the US (its op-ed page notwithstanding).
So, I was tickled on Friday to see Health Blog…
Folks are probably wrapping it up in St. Augustine at this hour, but I just wanted to send out happy 91st birthday wishes to the Old Lion, Stetson Kennedy.
Anastasia Books invites the community to a birthday celebration for Stetson Kennedy during the First Friday Art Walk.
Kennedy, the 91-year-old…
...but a chemically-altered analog derived from feverfew appears to have anticancer activity against leukemia stem cells. Researchers at the University of Rochester reported this week in the journal, Blood, that dimethylaminoparthenolide (DMAPT) has selective action against acute myeloid leukemia…
Although the dichloroacetate (DCA) horse has been beaten beyond recognition, PharmCanuck sends some interesting news from north of the border about how University of Alberta researchers have generated funds to support their clinical trial of this unpatented compound.
Our correspondent writes:
I was…
As you've probably seen elsewhere on ScienceBlogs, a number of us are teaming up to raise funds for teacher projects at DonorsChoose.org. DonorsChoose is a clever fundraising model for K-12 education projects where public funds don't quite meet the needs of teachers and kids.
The idea is that…
Do you remember dicholoroacetate (DCA)?
In a letter dated 24 September (PDF here), Dr Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta announced that his group had received approval from Health Canada and U of A's institutional review board to begin a Phase II clinical trial of dichloroacetate (…
The company whose Movable Type (MT) software powers us at ScienceBlogs, Six Apart, is doing a great thing by supporting one of our favorite charities, DonorChoose.org.
Between now and noon Monday you can request a code that will give you $30 to donate to any DonorsChoose project you'd like. What…
Beer is good for you, especially at this time of year. If I had my druthers (or knew what druthers were), I would be in Munich/München for the annual Oktoberfest celebration. This two week festival (22 Sept - 10 Oct this year) hosts over six million visitors and is a celebration of the Bavarian…
Posting will be light over the next week or so but there is plenty of great science blogging out there to feed your soul.
One of yesterday's more interesting posts, and pertinent to this blog, was by Mark Hoofnagle at denialism blog on the marketing of Head-On®, a homeopathic remedy whose sales are…
Earlier last week, we appeared as one of the featured bloggers asked to recommend their three, must-read life science blogs in The Scientist. All seven of the bloggers appearing were male; in fact, my avatar is an old German-American man who has been dead for 70 years.
The lack of female bloggers…
Great local coverage of Anton Zuiker, organizer with Bora Zivkovic of the NC Science Blogging Conference (SBC '08) (together with Brian Russell and the real Paul Jones).
The reporter, Dan Barkin of the Raleigh (NC) News & Observer, totally nailed Anton with this quote:
The Web has evolved into…
Just one last comment on the recently passed FDA legislation. I know that Terra Sig readers must be tiring of this issue already, but this aspect was too good to pass up. I started writing this post on a lark but the topic actually has serious public health implications.
John Mack at his Pharma…
The Pump Handle's Liz Borowski put up a nice post summarizing the key points of the >400-page Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act of 2007 (H.R. 3580).
Missing from the bill were any further restrictions on pharmaceutical direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertising - according to Liz, some…
You read correctly. If the US Senate does not pass an FDA funding bill today, 2,000 employees, nearly one-quarter of the FDA staff, will be relieved of their duties. (There were 8,157 FDA employees in 2006 - source). The House has already passed the bill but there are concerns:
Senate staffers…
A few days ago, I posted about a 1 September Cancer Research paper showing that a muscadine grape skin extract (MSKE) lacking resveratrol had activity in killing prostate cancer cells. I've finally had a chance to look at the paper. The study was very well-done by Dr Jeffrey Green's group at the…
This e-mail just came in overnight - a great move by the New York Times:
Dear TimesSelect Subscriber,
We are ending TimesSelect, effective today.
The Times's Op-Ed and news columns are now available to everyone free of charge, along with Times File and News Tracker. In addition, The New York Times…
Folks from The Scientist recently asked a group of science bloggers to recommend their three, must-read blogs to provide a guide to those who might not have been following the scientific blogosphere. Somehow I got selected to post my votes, a very challenging task to whittle down to three.…
Brian C. Martinson has written an excellent commentary that appears in the 13 September issue of Nature. The topic of "Universities and The Money Fix" is the discordance between the goals of NIH and research universities in conducting biomedical research and, as a result, generating research…
Leukemia Drug Adulteration
Chinese generic versions of the anticancer drugs, methotrexate and cytarabine hydrochloride, have been reported to be contaminated with an undisclosed substance according to several wire reports this morning.
Several children in a Shanghai hospital were reported to suffer…
[This post appeared originally at my Blogspot site on 20 December 2005 to describe my rationale for the name of this blog. With today's traffic from the Daily Kos, I thought it would be useful to new readers to know our story here. FYFI, here is why I chose the pseudonym Abel Pharmboy. - APB]
If…
[Welcome Daily Kos readers and many thanks to DarkSyde for the link - btw, if you're wondering what Terra Sigillata is, click here.]
The other day I fired off a quick post on the absurdity of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is proposing to cut reimbursements for two…
Just a quick post about observations I had at a recent prostate cancer meeting conducted by the US Department of Defense's (DOD) Congressionally-Directed Medical Research Program (CDMRP). In the US, DOD is second only to NIH in the amount of funding provided for breast and prostate cancer research…