Technology
revere | June 30, 2007The British Medical Journal is an odd thing. I was very impressed when they went Open Access a few years ago, only to be disappointed when they stopped, even though their new editor, Fiona Godlee, came over from the world's leading Open Access publisher of medical journals, BioMed Central. Recently they have been publishing pieces that seem to challenge conventional wisdom. This has the odor of "catch up to The Lancet" about it, but maybe not. In any event, conventional wisdom isn't always wrong. In fact it is mainly conventional because it is wise thinking. Not always, but usually. So it's…
pharyngula | June 28, 2007Albert Mohler might be freaking out at some of the new biotechnologies, but he missed a big one, one that might give him nightmares: synthetic biology. This week's Nature has a very fine editorial on a subject that's probably going to be more troubling to the religious than evolution, in a few years. We're on the verge of being able to create life in the laboratory.*
Synthetic biology provides a welcome antidote to chronic vitalism.Many a technology has at some time or another been deemed an affront to God, but perhaps none invites the accusation as directly as synthetic biology. Only a deity…
oracknows | June 26, 2007The Autism Omnibus trial continued last week, which was devoted primarily to the government's case. Consequently, there were a variety of real experts, as opposed to the pseudoexperts called by the prosecution last week. With only the occasional hiccup, they are taking serious bites out of the plaintiff's case, as documented on a near daily basis by Autism Diva and Kevin Leitch. Today, I want to focus on Day Eight of the testimony, not so much to beat up on those claiming that vaccines cause autism (although there's plenty of opportunity to apply some much deserved Respectful Insolence⢠to…
oracknows | June 23, 2007There are lots of medical discoveries today that are breathlessly hyped far beyond what their actual benefits are likely to be. This, apparently, is not a new phenomenon, as this story shows.
(Click on the pictures above for larger images of all four pages of the article, which appeared in 1939.)
On the other hand, given the advances in medical care that have come about because of X-rays, such as radiographs, CT scans, nuclear medicine scans, and the use of radiation to treat cancer, this story is actually not exaggerating all that much. Unfortunately, there didn't appear to be a clue…
tsmith | June 21, 2007 Sally Mason Named University Of Iowa's 20th President.
Interesting. A female biologist, currently Provost at Purdue:
During her tenure at Purdue, Mason invested both professionally and personally in diversity and innovative research and education.
She raised funds for and implemented a number of major diversity initiatives at Purdue, including creation of a Native American education and cultural center and a Latino Cultural Center, joining a black cultural center already on campus. She started two programs funded by the National Science Foundation that work to increase retention and…
oracknows | June 14, 2007At the monthly faculty meeting of our cancer center the other day, we had just finished listening to an invited talk by an ethicist about medical technology and the ethics of end-of-life care, when one of my colleagues happened to mention an article in the New York Times about how a perverse incentive system encourages oncologists to use chemotherapy even in patients for whom it may not benefit or may only provide marginal benefit. It's rare for something in the news to mesh so closely with the topic at hand; so I couldn't resist looking up the article, which appeared Tuesday morning, and was…
oracknows | June 11, 2007Dedicated advocate of evidence-based medicine that I am, I am sometimes labeled by those who do not understand skepticism as a "shill" for big pharma. Of course, such accusations are simply the logical fallacy known as poisoning the well, in which the credulous engage in preemptive ad hominem attacks designed to associate me with the hated big pharma, but it's a common enough tactic that sometimes I can't help but joke that I wish pharma did actually pay me for my little hobby here. After all, why do for free (or for a pittance from my Seed overlords) what, if you believe the alties, I could…
cmcclain | June 7, 2007
Welcome to our blog entry for the Carnival of the Blue on World Ocean Day, wherein we contemplate the question of the ocean as a glass half-empty or a glass half-full. Together, we see our modern culture as a blind man wandering down a forking path with a divining rod, flipping a Ying-Yang coin with a Devil on one shoulder and an Angel on the other. The blind man never knows what to do exactly, just to keep moving forward.
Deep Sea News looks forward before we step there, to examine two different paths through the ocean future. I will assume that mankind is basically evil, the ocean is…
thusspakezuska | June 3, 2007Every week in the Currents section of the Sunday paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer runs a feature called "Influences: What Shapes The Minds That Make The News". It's basically a "twenty questions" type of thing, with the same questions each week, and each week some interesting local bigwig answers it.
This week's bigwig is Catherine T. Hunt, who is president of the American Chemical Society, and is also described as a "leader in technology partnerships, Rohm & Haas Co., in Spring House". Let me just note here that she is also an alumna of Smith College; women's colleges send a…
grrlscientist | June 1, 2007tags: cyborg-moth, robotics, insects, warfare
Would you think I was talking about a science-fiction novel if I told you that scientists can control the movements of a live moth using a joystick, and this moth was being used to spy on terrorist training camps in the hills of Pakistan? Just imagine; such a moth would be able to sit in a terrorist camp without arousing suspicion, while sending video and other information back to its homebase using a "reliable tissue-machine interface." But hey, apparently, this is not the stuff of science-fiction at all. In fact, this technology is being…
pharyngula | May 30, 2007The Newsweek cover story is on recent efforts to create life in the laboratory, and of course they call this "playing God". Haven't they got the message yet? "Playing God" is where you do absolutely nothing, take credit for other entities' work, and don't even exist — scientists don't aspire to such a useless status. Besides, creating life is mundane chemistry, no supernatural powers required.
It's a curious article. There's some solid discussion of ongoing work on synthetic biology, with Craig Venter and George Church as the stars. These fellows and others are confident (and rightfully so, I…
petnoyer | May 25, 2007
There's a whole new revenue stream on the horizon. Livescience reports that Japanese scientists in the AMOEBA (Advanced Multiple Organized Experimental Basin), project have learned to write on water.
The image above shows the letter S formed by standing waves in a custom engineered water tank designed to generate Japanese characters and letters from the Roman alphabet.
This in one of four marine oriented Weird Science Stories of the Year.
Check 'em out here
cmooney | May 24, 2007Dr. Montgomery McFate, a noted anthropologist and Pentagon consultant currently based at the U.S. Institute for Peace, has pointed out an historical military role of her academic field in understanding the local populace during the Colonial period. Despite this intermingled history of anthropology and the military, however, modern-day defense policymakers and academic researchers rarely play well together in the proverbial sandbox. In general, a Cold War-era preoccupation with technological superiority, combined with the negative aftereffects of poor cultural understanding of opposing forces…
denialism | May 22, 2007
This new paper from Stem Cells is a wonderful example of the potential of human embryonic stem cells (hESC) to treat diseases like Type I diabetes.
The reason type I diabetes is such an obvious target for hESC therapy get a little complicated, but I'll walk you guys through this paper, and recent results in islet cell transplantation to give you an idea why this result is very promising.
Type I diabetes results from the destruction of the pancreatic islet cells, or specifically the beta cells in the islets which are responsible for insulin production in response to rising blood sugar. As a…
evolvingthoughts | May 20, 2007
In a paper in PNAS, Ackland et al. argue that neutral cultural features can "hitchhike" along with some adaptive practice such as farming, in a way that ends up generating hard cultural borders:
The wave-of-advance model was introduced to describe the spread of advantageous genes in a population. It can be adapted to model the uptake of any advantageous technology through a population, such as the arrival of neolithic farmers in Europe, the domestication of the horse, and the development of the wheel, iron tools, political organization, or advanced weaponry. Any trait that preexists…
jstemwedel | May 16, 2007My recent post on the feasibility (or not) of professionalizing peer review, and of trying to make replication of new results part of the process, prompted quite a discussion in the comments. Lots of people noted that replication is hard (and indeed, this is something I've noted before), and few were convinced that full-time reviewers would have the expertise or the objectivity to do a better job at reviewing scientific manuscripts than the reviewers working under the existing system.
To the extent that building a body of reliable scientific knowledge matters, though, we have to take a hard…
oracknows | May 16, 2007One of the favorite targets of pseudoscientists is the peer review system. After all, it's the system through which scientists submit their manuscripts describing their scientific findings or their grant proposals to their peers for an evaluation to determine whether they are scientifically meritorious enough to be published or to be funded. Creationists hate it. HIV/AIDS denialists hate it. Indeed, pseudoscientists and cranks of all stripes hate it. There's a reason for that, of course, namely that vigorous peer review is a major part of science that keeps pseudoscientists from attaining the…
oracknows | May 11, 2007I really love Life Technologyâ¢. I really do. Heck, I could spend the next several weeks mining it for topics for Your Friday Dose of Woo. The stuff there's so over-the-top that I find it hard to believe that these guys are serious. I mean, really, look at some of their products, a couple of which I've featured on YFDoW before; specifically the Ultra Advanced Psychotronic Money Magnet Professional Version 1.0⢠(a.k.a. The Ultimate in Financial Abundance Engineering Technologyâ¢) and the Tesla Purple Energy Shieldâ¢, two pieces of such amazingly tasty woo that it's pretty hard to top them.…
nisbetmc | May 9, 2007How do you activate an otherwise disinterested Republican base on the issue of global warming? As we argued in our Policy Forum article at Science, two possible frames are to recast the issue as really a matter of moral duty or alternatively as an issue that might promote increased profits from new technologies.
In recent weeks a new frame strategy has emerged and it involves re-focusing attention to the issue around dimensions of national security. Again, advocates need to be careful here. The national security frame borders on a lot of the interpretations that have previously been…
mikethemadbiologist | May 8, 2007Senator Obama earned a lot of points in my book today because he took the leadership of the U.S. auto companies to task for being such retrograde, anti-progress morons. From the NY Times (italics mine):
In a speech that hit hard at the failings of Detroit automakers, Mr. Obama, a Democratic presidential candidate, said Japanese companies had done far better than their Detroit counterparts to develop energy efficient vehicles....
"For years, while foreign competitors were investing in more fuel-efficient technology for their vehicles, American automakers were spending their time investing in…