purepedantry | June 12, 2006Focus on the Family, a conservative social organization located in Colorado Springs, CO, has decided to oppose the mandatory vaccination of young girls for Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), a virus linked to the formation of cervical cancer. Recently the FDA has approved a vaccine for two of the high risk (more likely to form cancer) subtypes that has proved very effective (over 90%) at preventing HPV infection in girls when administered before sexual activity.
Diane Carman of the Denver Post has this coverage:
HPV is a sexually transmitted disease that is the cause of more than 70 percent of…
purepedantry | June 12, 2006Nick from The Scientific Activist has busted out a salient article from the archives related to the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006. I think he gives a fair treatment to the Act and its implications. As he is giving it a qualified endorsement, I thought I would chime in on the Con side to give a diversity of opinion.
Though I would read his post, I have tried to faithfully summarize his arguments for and against below (if I have been unfair in my summary I hope he or someone else will let me know):
Pro
1) The public pays for the research making it public property that should…
purepedantry | June 11, 2006Hi all you Neuroscience bloggers out there. I -- and many of the other neuroscience-related bloggers on this site -- sense a strong need for a neuroscience carnival -- a way to regularly collect all of our valuable posts in a predigested form. So I am asking you to submit your best neuroscience posts over the next two weeks to me for the first "The Synapse" (a neuroscience carnival) to be published on June 25th.
Please send links including your name and your blog's name to jamesjyoung at your friendly neighborhood gmail. I would also appreciate a one or two sentence summary of the…
purepedantry | June 11, 2006A 28-year-old woman has been cited for lewdness for exposing herself inside a store. The woman was riding a motorized cart inside Lin's Market Place on Thursday with her pants around her ankles and not wearing underwear.
Customers didn't notice the woman until she would stand up from the cart and bend over to look at items on the shelf, exposing her buttocks.
The woman told police she arrived in Cedar City with a circus but was left behind.
Ahhh! So she was from the circus. That makes so much more sense now...Carnie folk -- you just can't trust 'em.
purepedantry | June 11, 2006Why do people run for office? Is it because -- as I would guess -- of some psychological trauma they endured as children? Or do they possess a gene variant common in the Kennedy's?
A study in the American Political Science Review delves deeply into the subject concluding (shockingly) that people have different reasons:
The authors significantly revise existing methods of explaining decisions by lower-office holders to run for higher office. First, they distinguish between ambition formation and the decision to run itself, positing and finding that "progressive ambition" exists prior to a…
purepedantry | June 11, 2006Dr. Robert Singer and colleagues at Albert Einstein have observed transcription in single eukaryotic cells -- that's right single cells.
I will divide how into two groups for the initiated and the uninitiated so you can both see how cool this is.
For the uninitiated: In order for a cell to make proteins, it must first make a copy of its DNA to send to the cellular machinery that makes proteins. This is called an RNA molecule. While scientists have developed a bunch of ways to look at RNAs, all those methods up until this point were done on the collection of RNAs from many cells rather…
purepedantry | June 10, 2006CNN reports on a survey of the increasing number of people getting tats:
The American University employee is among about 36 percent of Americans age 18 to 29 with at least one tattoo, according to a survey.
The study, scheduled to appear Monday on the Web site of the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, provides perhaps the most in-depth look at tattoos since their popularity exploded in the early 1990s.
The results suggest that 24 percent of Americans between 18 and 50 are tattooed; that's almost one in four. Two surveys from 2003 suggested just 15 percent to 16 percent of U.S.…
purepedantry | June 10, 2006A sheriff's deputy who is accused of going topless at a campground has been fired and charged with indecent exposure and disorderly conduct.
Dawn Rene Roberson, 38, of Royal, was fired Wednesday after she turned herself in on the misdemeanor charges.
According to incident reports, a marine patrol deputy and a park ranger told a topless Roberson to cover up in separate encounters Sunday.
Oh come on. Why you got to hate on the topless police? I would frankly feel much safer if all the police went topless. It gives it that air of familiarity that I have grown to love in law enforcement.
purepedantry | June 10, 2006Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why?
I guess if I had to go back and do it all again, I would have gone through with being a physicist. When I got to college I knew that I was just destined to be a physicist because that was the subject that I liked the best in high school. Little did I know at the time that college level physics is a hell of a lot more difficult than computing the trajectory of spherical cows.
This question doesn't quite apply to me though because I am still…
purepedantry | June 9, 2006Here is a interesting idea about how to treat pain without addicting people to pain killers.
There is some back story to this business that you should know before we discuss why this is a cool idea, though.
Opioid drugs -- like codeine, morphine, and heroine -- act in the nervous system by activating receptors in specific regions of the brain that result in pain relief. If you were wondering though why evolution would be so kind as to make natural receptors to get yourself high, they are there because there are actually natural compounds that act at these receptors and do some similar…
purepedantry | June 9, 2006This article in Science News is really interesting as it goes into the causes of disruptive behavior in children. I don't have much time to review it now as I have the last test of my graduate school life in about an hour and a half, but I think it cuts a good balance between saying that genes matter and saying that they matter in an enviromental context.
I will be doing the happy dance with more posts later.
purepedantry | June 9, 2006Hi,
Most of this stuff appears in the About or Contact section but I thought I would put it out front on the first day.
My name is Jake Young, and I am an MD-PhD student focusing on Neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Yes, my parents are quite proud, but I assure you that at present it qualifies me for very little other than arguing the finer points of tissue culture. Despite abject lack of qualifications, this blog will at least attempt to delve deeply into science and other things. Actually, I hope for that to someday be my epitaph: "Jake, he talked a lot about science and…