revere | October 10, 2007I didn't think it possible, but the intellectual property nonsense promoted by the movie and record industries has reached new heights of lunacy. This is from the UK, but it could just as easily be the US:
A car repair firm has been taken to court accused of infringing musical copyright because its employees listen to radios at work.
The action against the Kwik-Fit Group has been brought by the Performing Rights Society which collects royalties for songwriters and performers.
At a procedural hearing at the Court of Session in Edinburgh a judge refused to dismiss the £200,000 damages claim.
[…
revere | October 10, 2007It's taken longer than many of us wanted, but some new data on host susceptibility is now coming in. The influenza research group at St. Jude's has just published a paper in CDC's journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases, verifying that common land based birds can be infected with highly pathogenic avian influenza virus H5N1. The St. Jude's group inoculated house sparrows, European starlings and pigeons with four strains of H5N1 that were isolated in 2004 - 2006.
Hi path H5N1 was first found in poultry in southern China in 1996. It is lethal to chickens and other poultry. Ducks are usually…
revere | October 9, 2007The good news in 1995 was that American students performed better than Austrian students in advanced mathematics among students finishing highschool. The bad news was that Austria as the only on eof 16 countries American students finished ahead of, and in physics they didn't even do that. They were dead last. A couple of weeks ago Science magazine reported that the Bush administration wasn't going to let that happen again:
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), part of the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES), says it is bowing out of 2008 TIMSSA…
revere | October 9, 2007Fumigating the soil before planting pretty much kills any pests that might be in it. Unfortunately the fumigant tends to seep up through the soil and expose workers and others nearby. When the highly toxic fumigant methyl bromide was banned under the Montreal protocol as a greenhouse gas an ozone depleting gas, growers started looking for a replacement. Now the EPA has approved one, methyl iodide. If you know any chemistry, you might suspect that replacing one halogen with another might not solve the problem. Indeed methyl iodide is nasty. If you want to use it you must employ a certified…
revere | October 8, 2007Once again it's the 2007 Blogging Scholarship contest. It's been just short of a year since we offered everyone reading the opportunity to Send a Blogger to College. Now you get another chance. Of course the blogger in question, the now well-known Shelley Batts, maestra of Retrospectacle and my SciBling here at ScienceBlogs, is long out of college and close to being done with doctoral studies in the neurosciences at the University of Michigan. Last year she very nearly took the prize (with magnificent help from readers of Effect Measure). She's a finalist once again and this year the prize is…
revere | October 8, 2007Preamble via Slashdot: News.com reports that the FCC won't be investigating the phone record disclosures by communications companies under US government pressure. Despite a congressional request for that probe, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin quashed the inquiry based on comments from National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell.
Back in the day, when I was a young strippling in 60s New York, we tuned nightly to a listener supported station of the Pacifica Foundation, WBAI. It was great. Bob Fass in the wee hours. One of the things WBAI did 30 years ago was take on the FCC over broadcast of…
revere | October 8, 2007The US invasion of Iraq has not managed to spread Democracy in the region but it is successfully spreading Cholera:
The number of cholera cases in Iran is on the rise after the outbreak of an epidemic in neighbouring Iraq, an Iranian health official was quoted as saying on Saturday.
"The last count shows 43 people have contracted cholera in Kordestan province," Mohsen Zahrai, who is in charge of water and food-borne diseases, told ISNA news agency.
He said those affected had been commuting across the border with Iraq and warned Iranian citizens to postpone pilgrimages to Iraq until the…
revere | October 7, 2007Since most of you know from this blog what a nerd I am now, in late adulthood, you can only imagine how nerdy I was when I was a teenager. Nerdy enough to be part of a rocket club. Not sponsored by the school. Just five of us who got together and built solid fuel rockets. This was 50 years ago. We had a test stand and everything. We experimented with nozzle configurations we machined ourselves on a lathe we had access to. We tried different burst diaphragms and fuel mixtures. No one sold kits for this then. We made everything ourselves. We entered a science fair and we had our pictures…
revere | October 7, 2007Last week someone by the name of Theo Hobson expelled a hard, dry turd onto the pages of The Guardian:
Richard Dawkins wants America's atheists to stand up and be counted. He wants them to form a lobby that's capable of challenging the religious culture they inhabit. He says that about 10% of the nation is atheist - if these godless millions unite, then they can begin to influence national politics. Dawkins has even tried to start the ball rolling, by launching a movement called the Out Campaign.
[snip]
[Quoting Dawkins] "When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has…
revere | October 6, 2007The headline was worrisome: "Bird flu becoming riskier for humans." The story was about a new paper in PLoS Pathogens from Kawaoka's lab that was said to identify "a specific change that could make bird flu grow in the upper respiratory tract of humans," according to the lab leader.
Birds usually have a body temperature of 41 degrees Celsius, and humans are 37 degrees Celsius. The human nose and throat, where flu viruses usually enter, is usually around 33 degrees Celsius.
"So usually the bird flu doesn't grow well in the nose or throat of humans," Kawaoka said. This particular mutation…
revere | October 5, 2007Someday people will look back on the period of terrorism hysteria with wonder, maybe even wry amusement. There are terrorists, to be sure. Some of them work for sovereign states and are part of their military or police. Some of them work for "non state" entities. Those are the ones governments like to call terrorists. Terminology is important, I guess. Governments and terrorists have several things in common. Both have the objective of terrorizing and frightening people as a matter of policy. That's why we call them terrorists. Governments add the extra fillip of frightening their own…
revere | October 5, 2007When the Topps Meat Company recalled 300,000 pounds of frozen hamburger on September 25 because of E. coli contamination that was bad. It got worse on September 30 when the recall was expanded to 21.76 million pounds, the third largest recall in US history. It got worse yet when it was revealed that 28 people in Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, Maine, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania states have fallen ill from eating the contaminated meat. Maybe the worst yet comes from a Chicago/McClathy Tribune News Service report that the US Department of Agriculture waited 18 days after learning…
revere | October 4, 2007You're in a crowded bar near the airport and your co-worker is trying to tell you something important. She wants you to do something before you drive her car to the garage for her. She is heading out of town. But you can't hear her over the din from the crowd. It's too noisy, too much cross talk. Later you discover she was telling you the gas gauge is broken and the tank almost empty. But you know that. After you ran out of gas on the freeway. Now imagine you are a developing fetus. Genes in your nervous system are turning on and off in a precise sequence in response to what's going on in…
revere | October 4, 2007Swedish scientists are warning about Tamiflu in the environment because it passes through sewage treatment plants more or less unchanged. Readers of this blog may remember this coming up before when Andrew Singer and his colleagues in the UK published an article in Environmental Health Perspectives a year ago asking a logical question: what would happen in a pandemic if everyone started taking hoarded and stockpiled Tamiflu at once? Singer gave good reasons to think the active form of Tamiflu, oseltamivir carboxylate, would pass through the wastewater system. The Swedish study apparently…
revere | October 3, 2007If you increase spending for research on the world's most dangerous microbes you might want to also increase your surveillance and safety oversight. Since 2001 NIH expenditirues for biodefense research have increase over 40 times. And oversight?
American laboratories handling the world's deadliest germs and toxins have experienced more than 100 accidents and missing shipments since 2003, and the number is increasing steadily as more labs across the country are approved to do the work. No one died, and regulators said the public was never at risk during these incidents. But the documented…
revere | October 3, 2007The report of another bird flu death from Indonesia wouldn't seem to be "news." In a way, the fact it isn't "news" is news but we'll put that aside for the moment. Another thing about the story that isn't news is that the victim is a young person from the city of Jakarta, not a resident from a poor rural household living cheek by jowl with poultry:
The Health Ministry has confirmed that a West Jakarta shop attendant died of the bird flu Friday, increasing the country's human death toll from the virus to 86.
Ministry spokeswoman Lily Sulistyawati said test results for the latest bird flu…
revere | October 2, 2007Is Nigeria a member of the Coalition of the Willing? It appears to be, on the basis of this evidence. For background, let's go back to a BBC story on April 30, 2003:
Foreign currency worth nearly $200m has been found in a Baghdad neighbourhood, the US military say.
Troops found $100m and 90m euros in 31 containers, US Central Command said.
The money has been flown out of the country to a "secure location" for counting purposes and will eventually be returned to Iraq to help rebuild the country, the US said.
Last week, US troops found more than $650m in the same area of Baghdad.
The latest…
revere | October 2, 2007DDT has a checkered history, to be sure. Many of us remember walking through clouds of it in our childhoods, as it was sprayed willy-nilly for nuisance mosquitoes. The discovery that it was persistent in the environment (didn't break down) and harmed birds by thinning their egg shells (Rachel Carson's "silent spring") eventually led to its withdrawal from use. It is banned in the US, although it is not banned worldwide and is still used for vital public health purposes. Most of the actual uses during its heyday were for economic or aesthetic purposes with no public health rationale. Its…
revere | October 1, 2007George Mason University in Virginia is a good school. Slightly on the conservative side, politically, but with astute thinkers in economics, political science and many other fields, including molecular biology. It also has a National Center for Biodefense and Infectious Diseases. It has just announced it will be building a high containment research lab "aimed at thrusting the university into the forefront of the nation's counter-bioterrorism efforts" (Examiner.com).
The lab, which is being built adjacent to George Mason's Prince William campus in Manassas, will house laboratories that are…
revere | October 1, 2007Adverse drug reactions often appear idiosyncratic. Some drugs have powerful effects and everyone experiences the side effects (e.g., cancer chemotherapeutic agents). Others, however, seem to disagree with only a few people, although that disagreement can be major. Obviously drug companies would rather not have to contend with the fallout that occurs when their customers become collateral damage. Much of the controversy over drugs like Vioxx is how much the companies knew about that damage and what they did with that knowledge. Big Pharma would rather the blame the drug failure on the victim…