Technology
cevans | August 4, 2006
The Internet has long been a playground for deluded sociopaths. This is why the wise among us roundly deny Myspace.com friend requests from strangers, why paranoid parents install content filters on their children's computers, and why I just trashed an email with the subject heading "Will you be my foreign business associate?"
We all know that, like the actual world, the digital world can be the "site" of plenty of dubious activity. There are no spatial limitations, nor standardized restrictions of content, to impede your standard misinformed lunatic from carving out their own hazardous…
j7uy5 | August 1, 2006I am at a coffee shop in a far away town, and I have things to do.
So I am not going to write about this extensively at the
moment. Still, while looking for something else, I
encountered this abstract. The title was odd enough to get my
attention.
href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=16504418&query_hl=2&itool=pubmed_docsum">Psychiatric
agriculture: systemic nutritional modification and mental health in the
developing world.Med Hypotheses. 2006;66(6):1234-9. Epub 2006 Feb 28.London DS, Stoll AL,…
apalazzo | July 30, 2006... or how the human brain is wired. Beware we'll be hearing from David Brooks, Frank Rich, William Gibson (Thomas Kuhn), and a preview of a Noam Chomsky and Robert Trivers discussion.
So I'm reading David Brooks in today's NYTimes, and it's the same old thing ... he's trapped in a different universe it seems. Apparently America (and Israel) are all powerful. They can do anything and whatever they want:
Lebanon is a chance to show that the death cult is not invincible.
To its enormous credit, the Bush administration has kept its focus on that core reality, and it has developed a strategy…
apalazzo | July 26, 2006And people think I'm down about the current situation.
In the last issue of Cell, Robert A. Weinberg is calling the current batch of postdocs The Lost Generation.
The abstract:
The funding policies of the NIH have made it increasingly difficult for young researchers to procure research funds. This threatens to drive a whole generation of young people away from careers in basic biomedical research.
First Paul Nurse, now Weinberg, I hope they are paying attention!
The numbers are striking. Over the past generation, the age at which American biomedical researchers with PhD degrees succeed in…
bushwells | July 26, 2006When Gleevec hit the market in 2001 for chronic myelogenous leukemia , it was hailed as a major breakthrough in cancer treatment. Gleevec, which inhibits bcr-abl kinase, was the harbinger of targeted chemotherapy and represented a departure from the cytotoxics which, although effective, possess a broad array of adverse effects. A History of STI 571, written by Brian Druker, M.D., the principal investigator who championed the compound, not only illustrates the genesis of the drug itself but also the interdisciplinary teamwork required for drug discovery. Behind Gleevec came Iressa, Astra…
j7uy5 | July 23, 2006American Scientist has
href="http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/50767?fulltext=true&print=yes">an
article about the potential for controlling
mosquito-borne diseases, by genetically modifying the insects to make
then
inhospitable to malaria and dengue. (Most of their articles
are
subscription-only, but this one is openly accessible.)
I mention this article, because it is interesting for three reasons.
For one, mosquito-borne illnesses are a major world health problem, and
anything that holds promise for defeating them is a matter of interest.
Second, it…
cortex | July 22, 2006So we lost the stem cell battle this year. Moral self-righteousness once again defeated pragmatic common sense. Of course, important political progress was made: Congress supported science, and Bush was forced to veto a popular bill.
So what should we do next year? I think one important argument for the pro-stem cell side was missing from this debate. If Bush and Brownback are really serious about preventing "immoral" embryo research, then it's now clear that the federal government must become involved. Back in August 2001, when Bush originally proposed his stem cell "compromise," he assumed…
scientificactivist | July 10, 2006This week's Ask a ScienceBlogger question is:
On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first successfully cloned mammal. Ten years on, has cloning developed the way you expected it to?
In short, my answer is yes. Although the number of species of mammals cloned has increased, slowly but surely, nobody is cloning their dead relatives yet. No surprise there. In 2006, though, cloning for cloning's sake isn't where it's at. Instead, the future of cloning lies in its applications to biomedical research. Today, that means, among other things, the prospect of using cloning to generate…
jstemwedel | July 6, 2006From Inside Higer Ed, there are reports that the end of regular increases in NIH funding (such that there will soon be a double-digit decline in the purchasing power of the NIH budget) are stressing out university researchers and administrators:
At Case Western Reserve University, a decline in NIH funds contributed to a budget shortfall of $17 million below projections for the 2006 fiscal year. NIH funds are key at Case -- and at many institutions the NIH is the largest outside source of research support.
While NIH officials have touted the fact that the number of new competitive grants will…
purepedantry | July 5, 2006FuturePundit posted an article about the decline in American's social attachment that my Mom actually emailed to me. My Mom being a Mom has a continuing interest in my social health, particular where this is related to my reproductive success (just kidding Mom).
Anyway, this article is about a study that shows the Americans have declining numbers of friends and confidants:
It compared data from 1985 and 2004 and found that the mean number of people with whom Americans can discuss matters important to them dropped by nearly one-third, from 2.94 people in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004.
Researchers…
clock | July 3, 2006This is a quick, rough translation of an article that ran in a Serbian newspaper a few days ago. It is written by a professor of psychology at the University of Belgrade, Prof.Dr.Zarko Trebjesanin, whose book about psychology of Tesla just got published in Belgrade. Posthumous psychoanalyzing is always suspect, but it is usually harmless and fun:
Nikola Tesla's Personality - the Lonely Visionary
If we could imagine the modern world devoid of Tesla's discoveries, we'd be surprised at how impoverished it would be. The gigantic industries would be dead, factories empty, cities would be dark,…
purepedantry | July 2, 2006Popular Science has a great article on the recent advances in prosthetics. They hit on one of the topics that I think has been really under-researched: neural to machine interfaces. What you would really like to do with a prosthetic is have it communicate directly to and recieve information directly from the central nervous system. To whit:
Once science figures out better ways to attach artificial limbs, prosthetics themselves need to become smarter, able to act on signals sent directly from the brain. Consider the case of Jesse Sullivan, a power lineman from Dayton, Tennessee, who lost…
purepedantry | June 30, 2006This article in The Scientist describes a paper where the authors claim to have found empathy in mice. The problem is that what you define as empathy may be more a matter of semantics than of science:
There is an "increasingly popular" view that this kind of basic, pre-cognitive response to social cues may be present in all mammals, said Frans de Waal at Emory University and the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, who did not participate in the study. "This "highly significant [paper]...confirms that empathy is an ancient capacity," he told The Scientist in an Email.
...
In this study,…
revere | June 26, 2006Mount Sinai School of Medicine has just entered into "a territory limited license agreement with Avimex Animal Health" to produce a new biological that combines an H5 flu vaccine combined with portion of another important disease virus for commercial poultry, Newcastle Disease.The privately owned world-leader in the avian influenza H5 emulsified vaccine market will use Mount Sinai's patented live recombinant Newcastle disease technology that contains an insertion of the H5 gene, for use in Brazil, India, Japan, Mexico, and Taiwan.
Inventors, Peter Palese, PhD, Chairman and Professor,…
apalazzo | June 24, 2006Call it part II of an ongoing miniseries. Or, if you prefer, one of many entries on happiness.
Lets think about technology for a moment. Here I am typing on this laptop. Ideas flow (misspelled and grammatically incorrect) from my brain to my fingers to the keyboard ... over a wireless network ... into the vast ethereal space (known as the internet) ... to your home/workplace/café.
So what good is any of it?
You exclaim ... that's preposterous. Technology is good.
You would then continue ... All these gadgets and gizmos, they're good on many fronts. They make us live longer, they help us to…
clock | June 19, 2006The July issue of Discover Magazine has an excellent article on The Future of Terrorism. You should readthe whole thing, online or in hardcopy. Here are some choice quotes by people interviewed for the article:
"The war on terrorism is really a proxy for saying what is really a war on militant Islam. If we can't confront the ideology, if you're not willing to take on the ideology and try to develop a reformist, moderate Islam that makes militant Islam a fringe element, we haven't much hope to stamp it out."
Andrew C. McCarthy, former federal prosecutor who led the case against Sheik Omar…
revere | June 19, 2006I've spent some time here (old site, here, here, here, here and here) explaining WHO's place in the international system. It explains certain things I thought important to understand.
An important part of the international "system" (Westphalian-style) is there is no official authority over sovereign nation states. That means that power politics operates, sometimes quietly, sometimes nakedly. WHO is not immune. A shocking case in point relates to some highly questionable decisions made by the late WHO Director General, Dr. Lee Jong-wook. It is awkward to bring this up in the wake of his…
retrospectacle | June 15, 2006People dying of terminal illnesses now have the right to take experimental drugs that are not yet approved by the the FDA, a federal court of appeals ruled last month (as reported in June's Nature Medicine). While on the one hand, these drugs may bring some hope to those whose illness has been thus far unresponsive to therapy, on the other it may hasten their demise by exposing them to a range of untested side effects while not even conclusively treating their illness. The recent ruling is the result of a lawsuit filed against the FDA by the advocacy group Abigail Alliance, whose namesake…
chaoticutopia | June 14, 2006A number of bloggers have been posting about YearlyKos, including many who were there, and even some who were not. I wrote on Friday evening about some of the science discussions, but didn't really get into my impressions of the political atmosphere. This shouldn't surprise any of my old readers--I typically avoid the subject like the plague. Something about this weekend changed that, whether it was being encouraged by speakers such as Howard Dean or Harry "Give 'em Hell" Reid, or just encountering hundreds of intelligent individuals willing to discuss politics AND think for themselves.
Since…
clock | June 13, 2006SEED Magazine has an interesting article on the advances in avian transgenics....
I've been out of the loop for the past 3 or so years, but I took an Avian Biotechnology graduate class with Jim Petitte (mentioned in the article) a few years back, in which we did every step of the method separately, not really trying to make a transgenic chicken over a semester, but trying to figure out how to make each step work for us. The year I took it was the first time his class actually managed to produce a chimaera. Jim was so excited he was jumping up and down and hitting the ceiling - and he is a…