revere | November 23, 2006Since it's Thanksgiving I was going to do a shortish post about the tryptophan hypothesis being the cause of sleepiness after a turkey dinner, but the real expert on sleep cycles, my ScienceBlogs comrade Coturnix, beat me to it by a day. Which is good because without his excellent post I would certainly have made a science fool of myself. Which of course I would blame on being tired after eating a big turkey dinner. I won't repeat most of his post. You should read it foryourself. It is extremely interesting. But I will give you a bit to whet your appetite (sorrry!) and take the opporutninty…
revere | November 22, 2006China is becoming an environmental nightmare. Now experts from the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, a Chinese government think tank, have located the culprits. The rest of the world. We are forcing China to make products for them and as a result making their country an environmental paradise -- for polluters. Don't blame me for this bogus argument. I'm just telling you what they are saying:
A high-profile report released by a governmental think tank in Beijing, last week, berated current trade patterns, which resulted in China bearing the brunt of…
revere | November 22, 2006I like Representative Charlie Rangel, the feisty New York Democrat, but he's dead wrong on reinstating the military draft. It would be the worst thing that could happen.
Rangel has twice sponsored legislation to reintroduce the draft on the grounds that an all-volunteer army puts disproportionate burdens on the poor. Rangel believes, and I've heard many of my own generation say, if there were a draft we wouldn't be fighting in Iraq. There is the implication that the opposition to the Vietnam War on college campuses was driven almost entirely by the danger of being drafted. It wasn't. I was…
revere | November 21, 2006It's hard to believe but apparently people are still falling for the Nigerian email scam. Reuters has a story saying it is costing millions to UK residents and I'm guessing the same is true in the US. Since you are no doubt reading this on a computer and are therefore hooked up to the internet and probably have an email account somewhere, chances are you have been offered the chance to get risk via an URGENT MESSAGE.
The recipient is told they will earn a commission in exchange for aiding the sender in transferring funds.
The catch is that the victim has to send their bank details or even…
revere | November 21, 2006Breathing asbestos fibers kills workers. It's as simple as that. Not everyone who breathes asbestos gets an asbestos related disease but enough do that it is a real risk. So you don't want to work with asbestos without taking precautions and you can't take precautions if you don't know you are working with asbestos. Asbestos started being used in brakes in the early years of the auto industry, where it replaced leather and metal brake shoes that frequently went out of adjustment. When autos moved from two-wheel brakes to four wheel brakes in the 1920s the market became huge. In the 1930s we…
revere | November 20, 2006In the late 1990s congress decided to invest in our future by doubling the NIH budget. If you are a scientist today trying to get an NIH grant, however, you are in tough shape. Success rates are falling like a stone, with less than 20% of grant applications now being funded. It is common to submit a proposal several times before finally getting a grant or giving up and moving on. What happened?
A lot of scientists want to know that and it prompted NIH Director Elias Zerhouni to try and explain in in the latest issue of Science magazine, the country's premier science journal. The opening…
revere | November 20, 2006Reader Dylan has brought me the good news that the Bush Administration, with its many failings, has a plan to wipe out hunger in America. Really. And I think they will carry it out. Really.
The U.S. government has vowed that Americans will never be hungry again. But they may experience "very low food security."
Every year, the Agriculture Department issues a report that measures Americans' access to food, and it has consistently used the word "hunger" to describe those who can least afford to put food on the table. But not this year.
Mark Nord, the lead author of the report, said "hungry" is…
revere | November 19, 2006Nancy Pelosi is the new Speaker of the House but she has some illustrious (as well as not so illustrious) predecessors. Denny Hastert was not so illustrious. Tip O'Neill, the legendary congressman from Massachusetts, was another matter. O'Neill rented an apartment in Washington, DC, but mostly continued to live amongst his constituents in North Cambridge. One of his specialities was "constituent services," which meant anything from solving minor problems with the bureaucracy to finding jobs or government contracts. He is the source of the adage, "All politics is local" and he practiced retail…
revere | November 19, 2006I remember a joke that went something like, "What do you get when you cross a Jehovah's Witness with a Unitarian? Someone who knocks on your door for no apparent reason." I was reminded of this from an article in the Greensboro, NC News-Record, "Unitarian church extends welcome to nonbelievers."
It seems that it is quite common for people who identify themselves as atheists to come to Unitarian services in that North Carolina town:
This is Sunday morning service at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Greensboro, where even if the day's message wasn't "Embracing Atheism," the people here have…
revere | November 18, 2006Yet another urgent cry for help concerning the dire medical care catastrophe in the Israeli occupied territories of Palestine. Israel has cut off tax revenues they have collected, essentially confiscating Palestinian wages for work done. At the same time international donors have cut-off aid in an unconscionable act allegedly protesting an unwanted outcome to a democratic election in January 2006. The targets may have been Palestinian leaders, but it is ordinary people that have been hit.
As a consequence of these measures, the PA [Palestinian Authority] has been unable to pay regular…
revere | November 17, 2006Blog Carnivals are moderated link collections of the best of the blogosphere's postings on specific topics over the previous few weeks, or at least the best of those submitted to the carnival meister by the bloggers themselves or others. And they are almost always interesting and well written. We used to participate in Carnivals and then got out of the habit. But we think they are good so this week we are back, over at the Animalcules Carnival, this month hosted at Baumhaus. Animalcules is a microbiology carnival.
I hope you've already seen our contributions, but take a look at the others.…
revere | November 17, 2006Another "big" science story on the mutations in H5N1 that will a make it a pandemic strain. Same ending as the other stories. Not exactly.
Some of the blame for this rests with the scientists who can't resist going beyond what's in the paper when talking to reporters. I understand. I've done it myself, probably, although I try not to. On the one hand there are scientific conventions that suppress over interpretation in the published report, even when there are plausible speculations about larger meanings. On the other hand, there is the natural tendency to please the reporter, who is not…
revere | November 16, 2006Why do all Bush Administration policies have Orwellian titles like the polluter written Clear Skies Act? Or this one: The AIDS Leadership Act. Of course it doesn't say what direction it is leading AIDS policies. You decide. If you are a non-profit and want government funding for anything, you have to pledge to oppose commercial sex work. Abridgement of your rights of free speech? At least two Federal Courts have said so, but the Bushies are appealing the decisions.
Commercial sex workers (aka prostitutes, a rather imprecise term, as Congress and the Bush Administration are full of prostitutes…
revere | November 16, 2006I will admit to admiring the people of Cuba and having respect for what their health care system has done for them against great odds and in the face of a vicious US embargo. I've seen it with my own eyes, and although things have fallen on hard times because of the embargo, it performs better than anyone would have a right to expect. It is true Cuba's government is not a model of tolerance and can be very repressive, a tendency aided and abetted by US policy. But the spirit of the Cuban Revolution still has my admiration. They aren't worse, and in fact are better than many staunch US allies…
revere | November 15, 2006My Scibling, Orac, over at Respectful Insolence has a special thing about those he calls "alties." They make him crazy. For Orac alties represent a broad category of alternative medicine approaches. I more or less agree with him but I don't have the same passion about it he does. I'm also willing to believe some things now considered alternative approaches will become mainstream at some point and I know that many things we now consider conventional will be abandoned as without any scientific foundation. That's pretty much the way things work and I don't draw any larger lessons from it, except…
revere | November 15, 2006Over a year ago reports from Japan began to circulate that the influenza antiviral, Tamiflu, which is prescribed there often for uncomplicated seasonal influenza, was causing abnormal behavior, most worrisomely delirium and suicidal behavior in children. The drug is approved for adults and children over a year old. At that time the FDA decided the evidence was insufficient but planned to revisit the issue in a year. Now the year is up and FDA has apparently decided the evidence is stronger. They are now recommending patients who take Tamiflu be "monitored" for abnormal behavior. It isn't…
revere | November 14, 2006The title in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS, or "penis" in the trade) doesn't sound like much: Human Opiorphin, a natural antinociceptive modulator of opioid-dependent pathways (abstract). The first couple of sentences in the abstract are even less enticing:
Mammalian zinc ectopeptidases play important roles in turning off neural and hormonal peptide signals at the cell surface, notably those processing sensory information. We report here the discovery of a previously uncharacterized physiological inhibitor of enkephalin-inactivating zinc ectopeptidases in humans, which…
revere | November 14, 2006Today I got several emails, each asking for my views on a proposed change to the format for National Institutes of Health grant proposals. This may seem of only parochial interest except to those of us who make our living applying for NIH grants, but how health research is funded is of interest to the public in general so here's some background.
The NIH grant review process is one of the most admired in the world and a strong argument can be made it is responsible for the high quality of NIH supported science. I'll deal here with only the most important of the grant mechanisms at NIH, the so-…
revere | November 13, 2006One of the curious things about the response to Katrina was the relative invisibility of CDC Director Gerberding. She may be a catastrophically bad manager who likes to meddle in everything, but her great strength is as a superb communicator. Yet she appeared relatively little despite the many public health related questions in the aftermath of hurricane.
CDC has done its own internal critique of their response, a response they have trumpeted as one of the high points of the last few years, proof they say the Director's agency-wrecking re-organization that she has shoved done everyone's…
revere | November 13, 2006In this week's Science magazine Stephen Morse calls attention to what we have been saying here for a long time. We don't really know how influenza spreds from person to person. A recent review of the aerosol transmission route by Tellier in Emerging Infectious Diseases provides some additional information of interest.
There are four possible modes of transmission: aerosol, large droplet, direct contact via inanimate objects (called fomites in epidemiological jargon) and the gastrointestinal route. At this point we know very little about the gastrointestinal route, although some H5N1 cases…