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Modeling antiviral resistance, XVI: conclusion and take-home messages

[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.] This is the last in a long series attempting to explain a recent paper by Lipsitch et al. on mathematical modeling of the effects on influenza control of antiviral resistance, published in PLoS Medicine in January 2007. Modeling is a valuable technique but for most readers, even most scientists…

Whitewashing with the flu

Having taken on the American Chemical Society the other day, why stop there. Let's talk about the American Chemistry Council, the ACC (neé the Manufacturing Chemists' Association, then the Chemical Manufacturers Association and now ACC). And bird flu. Yes, bird flu. The ACC is a trade association of the largest chemical companies and has a division called the Chlorine Chemistry Division which has just launched a website "dedicated to educating the public on flu prevention and recovery." If you believe that I've got a 1995 Volvo with low mileage (for a Volvo) just for you. Only driven at the…

New York City trip - Part VI: Darwin

Friday, May 26th Afternoon So, about noon or so, we finally got to the American Museum of Natural History. I was pretty smart, actually... A few months ago, when we first started thinking about making this trip, I decided not to renew my subscription to Natural History Magazine, but to subscribe my wife instead. So, when we arrived at the museum, we skipped the long ticket lines and went straight to the "Members" desk, where my wife got a little discount, I got a student discount (yes, I still have a valid student ID - officially they did not kick me out yet), and the kids ar, quite…

Nature looks at the status of avian influenza three years after their Special Issue

I always cringe when I see headlines that say, "Whatever happened to bird flu?" Usually what comes next is a recital of other "scares" that never materialized, the poster child being Y2K (although it has been strongly argued that the reason Y2K didn't happen was precisely because the business world prevented it with a sustained and intense effort). The article in question, however, just appearing in Nature magazine, still the world's pre-eminent science journal, is authored by one of Nature's senior correspondents, Declan Butler, the same journalist writing in the same journal who helped put…

Are there big problems with the very small?

Over the years I've seen more than enough of the murderous destruction "the magic mineral, "asbestos, has caused in the lives of workers and their families. Exposure to asbestos causes a serious, often fatal, scarring of the lungs called asbestosis and also two different kinds of cancer of the respiratory tract: lung cancer and mesothelioma. Both cancers are usually fatal, but while lung cancer can be caused by other agents like cigarettes and various occupational chemicals, mesothelioma is mostly a result of exposure to asbestos. "Meso," as it is often called, is a horrific disease. It…

Meta-Blogging

This is so old (January 02, 2005) yet quite prescient... ----------------------------- Some blogs have thousands of daily visitors because they were there first. It is like carbonated drinks. Even if you make a drink that is much better than Coke or Pepsi, you are doomed to bankrupcy because they pre-empted you. And sure, even in the early days there was competition, and people like Kos, Atrios, Billmon, Drum, Marshall etc. were probably better than their competition, thus they are now deservedly the stars of the blogosphere. That does not mean they have managed to retain the high quality of…

Listen in on small businesses discussing draft OSHA infection control regulation

It’s been five years since the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) petitioned OSHA for a regulation to protect workers from infectious diseases. This week, OSHA will be taking a major step toward proposing such a rule. The agency and the Small Business Administration (SBA) will be convening a meeting of 50 representatives of small organizations (i.e., small businesses, not-for-profit organizations not dominant in their field, and local governments serving less than 50,000 residents) that would likely be affected by an OSHA infectious disease regulation. Such…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Washington Post reporter Lydia DePillis investigates the factors behind increasing workplace fatality rates among Latinos, even while overall workplace deaths in the U.S. are on the decline. DePillis starts with the story of Abdón Urrutia, a construction worker who injured his back while working on a project in Tysons Corner, Virginia. On the day of his injury, after Urrutia lifted himself up the floor, he says, the staff at the company where he worked gave him eight ibuprofen, and he was able to go back to work. And he was back at work the next day, too — on lighter duty, without carrying…

Study: Safe Routes to School investments save millions and improve quality of life

Building safe ways for children to bike and walk to school is more than just a way of encouraging kids to go outside and get active. According to a new study, it’s also an investment that reaps millions of dollars in societal gains. In other words, smart walking and biking infrastructures for kids make good economic sense. Published in the July issue of the American Journal of Public Health, the study examined the cost-effectiveness of Safe Routes to School (SRTS) infrastructure in just one city — New York City. SRTS was initially enacted in 2005 as part of a massive federal transportation…

Medicaid opt-out resulting in enormous losses for community health centers

$569 million. That’s how much revenue community health centers will miss out on because their state legislators decided not to expand Medicaid eligibility. The loss means that many community health centers will continue to struggle to serve all those in need, others will have to cut back on services and some could be forced to shut down altogether. “In some ways, it’s status quo,” Peter Shin told me. “But for many of them, it’s a bleak status quo.” Shin co-authored a recent report on the impact of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on uninsured patients at community health centers, zeroing in on…

OSHA settlement with Wal-Mart calls for use of third-party safety auditors

Federal OSHA announced this week a settlement agreement with Wal-Mart for serious safety violations found at its store on Chili Avenue in Rochester, NY.  Lots of companies sign settlement agreements with OSHA, but few of them involve making safety corrections at multiple worksites controlled by the same firm.  This settlement agreement will apply to 2,857 of Wal-Mart's 4,600 retail establishments in the U.S.  The 2,857 stores are all of the stores located in States where federal OSHA has enforcement jurisdiction. How will OSHA monitor Wal-Mart's compliance with the settlement agreement?  In…

Things I Have Learned Blogging at Science Blogs: Part The Three

The first two pieces of this series were largely comic pieces. This one is more serious. I have said this before, but I'll repeat it - I came to science blogs for one reason, and one only - because there was no one else talking about facing up to our material limits on this kind of site, with this kind of audience. I didn't come for the money (you may or may not believe me on this one, but as I keep saying, it isn't that I probably don't have a price, it is just that it isn't a few hundred bucks a month) - I've donated everything I've ever earned here (well less than 1K, given that they…

Mexico's daycare fire: not even babies are protected

by Garrett Brown On June 5th, 200 babies and small children were dropped off at a private, government-subsidized day care center in Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora state in northern Mexico.  A fire broke out next door and soon smoke and fire filled the day care center killing 48 babies and children, and severely burning two dozen more.  It turns out that the owners of the day care center included the wives of two top state officials and a businessman with close links to Eduardo Bours, governor of the state of Sonora.  It also turns out the building was a fire trap that had repeatedly…

Swine flu: features of past pandemics

by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure The spate of swine flu articles in The New England Journal of Medicine last week included an important "Perspective, The Signature Features of Influenza Pandemics â Implications for Policy," by Miller, Viboud, Baliska and Simonsen. These authors are familiar to flu watchers as experienced flu epidemiologists and analysts of archival and other data. Analysis of archival data is sometimes described as archeo-epidemiologic research. In their NEJM article Miller et al. summarize what they see as some common features in the three flu pandemics of the…

Battling for Bayer

Cross-posted from Sustained Outrage: a Gazette Watchdog Blog   by Ken Ward, Jr. Bayer CropScience hasnât said yet if it will challenge $143,000 in fines issued by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration for 13 serious and 2 repeat violations related to the August 2008 explosion and fire that killed two Institute plant workers.  But a vigorous court fight seems likely, given who Bayer has hired as its lawyer in the matter.  Robert C. Gombar is well known for his efforts to help companies that butt heads with OSHA over allegations that they werenât complying with workplace…

Bayer's Secrecy Started with Their 911 Call

By Celeste Monforton Last August 28, Bill Oxley and Barry Withrow, 45 were working at the Bayer CropScience’s plant  in Institute, WV when a massive fireball erupted in an area where methomyl for the carbamate insecticide thiodicarb (Larvin) is produced.  Mr. Withrow was killed immediately in the blast, and Mr. Oxley died after 43 days in a Pittsburgh burn center.   When I first wrote about this disaster, in "911 operator: “I’m only allowed to tell you we have an emergency," I focused on reporting by the Charleston-Gazette's Ken Ward, who used excerpts from the 911 emergency call transcripts…

Future Physicians Call for Transparency in Global Pharmaceutical Policy

By Mary Carol Jennings In the setting of the upcoming elections, my Senator, Jim DeMint, recently wrote a letter of opinion to the Washington Times opposing a global HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria bill that will provide life-saving medications and prevention against infectious disease in the developing world.  Though the White House and a broad bipartisan coalition of legislators and community groups support this bill, his statements suggest that he considers this bill a superfluous, expensive government investment.  When DeMint has called for our leaders to reduce the programâs funding…

Looking for caskets instead of holiday gifts

The families of the workers killed at the T2 Lab are now planning memorial services instead of holiday celebrations. "With Christmas next week, we're not shopping for gifts--we've got to go look at caskets," said a relative of Parrish Ashley, 36, one of the four men killed in the Wednesday explosion.  Mr. Ashley and his deceased co-worker, Karey Henry, 35 were best friends, according to family members.  They were: "side by side in a break-room trailer about 1:30 pm when they were killed by a blast that witnesses described as like a bomb going off.   'They were together throughout all…

Some skills in medicine are harder to teach

Teaching facts is easy. Medical students eat facts like Cheetos, and regurgitate them like...well, use your imagination. Ask them the details of the Krebs cycle, they deliver. Ask them the attachments of the extensor pollicis brevis, and they're likely to describe the entire hand to you. Facts, and the learning of them, has traditionally been the focus of the first two years of medical school. The second two years deals with putting facts into action. Teaching medical students and residents is very different from being a school teacher, something with which I have first-hand knowledge…

Prospects "bleak" for young researchers

You've heard about the depressing state of funding today in biomedical science. That's only part of the reason why increasingly, graduate students and post-docs are looking outside of academia for jobs, as discussed recently in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Researchers today have access to powerful new tools and techniques -- such as rapid gene sequencers and giant telescopes -- that have accelerated the pace of discovery beyond the imagination of previous generations. But for many of today's graduate students, the future could not look much bleaker. They see long periods of training…

Bazell says "quit whining"

NBC's science and health correspondent, Robert Bazell, has an opinion piece today on MSNBC: Stop whining about intelligent design. Scientists should stop whining about threats to the teaching of evolution and spend more time discussing values. I should note here that most of the piece is strongly supportive of teaching evolution. Bazell presents a very brief overview of the history of anti-evolutionism in America, and notes that "serious efforts in biology and medicine can no more ignore evolution than airplane designers can ignore gravity." So, he's not messing around or giving any…

A cryptozoology meeting at the Zoological Society of London

On July 12th 2011 a very interesting thing is happening - interesting, that is, if you're interested in the academic evaluation of cryptozoological data. ZSL (the Zoological Society of London) is hosting the meeting 'Cryptozoology: science or pseudoscience?'. Speakers are Charles Paxton, Michael Woodley and myself. Henry Gee is acting as chair. Given that one of the things we hope to address is whether cryptozoology - whatever that term might mean - should be considered a valid branch of zoological science, this meeting shouldn't be taken as evidence that cryptozoology has finally "come in…

Manual Calculation: Using a Slide Rule (part 1)

Several people in the geekout thread asked me to explain how a sliderule works, and I've been meaning to write a couple of article about manual computing devices. So I thought I'd do it. There's a nice slide-rule simulator at [Derek's Virtual Slide Rule Gallery][sr], which is what I used to generate the images in this article. I know a lot of people think that the idea of learning to use something like a slide rule is insane in an age of computers and calculators, and that this is a silly thing to post about. But I really *love* slide rules, and not *just* because I'm a geek. Slide rules make…

Irrational and Transcendental Numbers

If you look at the history of math, there've been a lot of disappointments for mathematicians. They always start off with an idea of math as a clean, beautiful, elegant thing. And they seem to often wind up disappointed. Which leads us into todays strange numbers: irrational and transcendental numbers. Both of them were huge disappointments to the mathematicians who discovered them. So what are they? We'll start with the irrationals. They're numbers that aren't integers, and that aren't a ratio of any two integers. So you can't write them as a normal fraction. If you write them as a continued…

Restudying Math in light of The First Scientific Proof of God?

A reader sent me a link to [this amusing blog][blog]. It's by a guy named George Shollenberger, who claims to have devised The First scientific Proof of God (and yes, he always capitalizes it like that). George suffers from some rather serious delusions of grandeur. Here's a quote from his "About Me" bio on his blog: >I retired in 1994 and applyied my hard and soft research experience to today's >world social problems. After retirement, my dual research career led to my >discovery of the first scientific proof of God. This proof unifies the fields >of science and theology. As a…

Back to π-Calculus: a better introduction

Now that things are settling down a little bit, I wanted to get back to the stuff I was writing about π-calculus. But looking back at what I've already written, I think I did a terrible job of introducing it. So I'm going to start over, and try to be more clear. I'll start with a basic refresher of what π-calculus is for, and a bit of history for where it came from. When computer networks first appeared and came into relatively widespread use, one of the problems that smart people recognized quite quickly is that communicating systems are fundamentally different from the kinds of…

Enough mammals for the time being: crocodiles on Inside Nature's Giants (part III)

The third episode of Inside Nature's Giants (still available to watch, if you're in the UK) looked at a 17-year-old, 4 m long Nile crocodile Crocodylus niloticus that had died (very much prematurely) at a crocodile park in France (please read part I and part II unless you have already). RVC pathologist Alun Williams tried to work out the cause of death. Greg Erickson was the on-site crocodile expert, so (as expected) jaw anatomy and bite force were focused on to begin with (see Erickson et al. 2003a, b). The pterygoideus muscles - you can see some of them here, with Erickson in the…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 23 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Morphometrics Parallel Genetics in a Newly Discovered and Endangered Taxon of Galápagos Tortoise: Galápagos tortoises represent the only surviving lineage of giant tortoises that exhibit two different…

New and Exciting in PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine

Monday night - time to check out the new articles in PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine: Is Sleep Essential?: Everybody knows that sleep is important, yet the function of sleep seems like the mythological phoenix: "Che vi sia ciascun lo dice, dove sia nessun lo sa" ("that there is one they all say, where it may be no one knows," Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte [1790], Così fan tutte). But what if the search for an essential function of sleep is misguided? What if sleep is not required but rather a kind of extreme indolence that animals indulge in when they have no more pressing…

Semlin Judenlager

This is a website worth spending some time on and looking at every page: This website is linked to a British Academy funded research project on the post-World War Two memorialisation of one of the main sites of the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Serbia, the Semlin Judenlager. Established by Nazi Germany in December 1941 on the outskirts of Belgrade, Semlin (also known by its Serbian name SajmiÅ¡te) was one of the first concentration camps in Europe, created specifically for the internment of Jews. Between March and May 1942, approximately 7,000 Jewish women, children and the elderly (almost half…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Children Are Naturally Prone To Be Empathic And Moral: Children between the ages of seven and 12 appear to be naturally inclined to feel empathy for others in pain, according to researchers at the University of Chicago, who used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans to study responses in children. Scientists Identify Genetic Basis For The Black Sheep Of The Family: Coat color of wild and domestic animals is a critical trait that has significant biological and economic impact. Researchers have now identified the genetic basis for black coat color, and white, in a breed of domestic…

What He Says! Interview with Deepak Singh

Deepak Singh blogs on business|bytes|genes|molecules and, as the cartoon below testifies, has built for himself quite a reputation as an authority on the questions of Open Access and the future of science communication on the Web. We first met at Scifoo last summer and it was great pleasure to host Deepak here on my home grounds at the Science Blogging Conference last week. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your background? What is your Real Life job? That's a great question. I am a bit of a nomad…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 34 articles published in PLoS ONE this week. As always, look around, read, rate, comment, annotate.... Here are my picks for the week (no need to repeat the dinosaur paper here, of course): A Viscoelastic Deadly Fluid in Carnivorous Pitcher Plants: Carnivorous pitcher plants supplement their nutrient intake by trapping and digesting insects in what were thought to be passive pitfall traps. But in this study, the authors show that the pitchers of plants Nepenthes rafflesiana in fact employ highly specialized secretions to doom their victims. They show that this fluid, even when…

Magpies Challenge Bird Brain Myth

tags: cognition, behavior, self-recognition, self awareness, tool use, memory, brain architecture, birds, European magpie, Pica pica, researchblogging.org Figure 1. European magpie, Pica pica, with yellow mark [larger view]. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060202. Birds have been disparaged publicly as "bird brains" for so long that most people have lost the ability to view them as intelligent and sentient beings. However, a group of researchers in Germany have conducted a series of studies with several captive European magpies, Pica pica, that challenge the average person's view of birds and…

It was 25 years ago today...

To what extent do you worry about AIDS, either with respect to yourself, your children, or the world at large?... In this business, you tend to accumulate a lot of paper, and eventually you learn to cull it, ruthlessly-ish. But there are always some things you keep, to remind you... one item in my stack is the 16 Dec 1982 issue of New Scientist, on page 713 is a 3 page news article on the mystery of the 500 cases of a new syndrome of "acquired immunodeficiency", including 11 cases in Europe. 175 of these had died. The article discusses extensively the possibility that this is caused by…

whence nuclear Iran?

After the revelations about Syria's plausible secret nuclear project, destroyed by an Israeli air raid, speculation is turning back to Iran Arms Control Wonk and Whirled View have info, and interesting discussion in comments; and Nuclear Mangos has sprung back to life, which is a worrying sign to the cognoscenti. If you trust the provenance of the photos that have been published, then Syria was doing a poor man's nuclear weapons program: they had the smallest possibly gas cooled, graphite moderated natural uranium reactor being built. British technology, via North Korea. Capable of…

Reprogramming the pancreas

Wow…so have you heard about this result? One goal of regenerative medicine is to instructively convert adult cells into other cell types for tissue repair and regeneration. Although isolated examples of adult cell reprogramming are known, there is no general understanding of how to turn one cell type into another in a controlled manner. Here, using a strategy of re-expressing key developmental regulators in vivo, we identify a specific combination of three transcription factors (Ngn3 (also known as Neurog3) Pdx1 and Mafa) that reprograms differentiated pancreatic exocrine cells in adult mice…

New Yorkers Really Love Their Flowers

tags: Amsterdam Avenue, NYC through my eye, photography, photoessay I don't know if you know this, but the weather in NYC is hell. Seriously. Whether you imagine hell to be a furnace or a freezer, NYC is nearly always at either extreme. The weather here typically varies between hot and humid, so you have the distinct displeasure of smiling at people while sweat streams down your face all day long, or cold and windy, so you are in danger of freezing to death while waiting for the bus. By my calculations, there are somewhere between 13 and 15 days each year of "weather purgatory": you know,…

Study: Trust in science spiked after media coverage of Zika vaccine trial

Public trust in science is a fickle creature. Surveys show a clear majority of Americans believe science has positively impacted society, and they’re more likely to trust scientists on issues like climate change and vaccines. On the other hand, surveys also find that factors like politics, religion, age and race can greatly impact the degree of that trust. It presents a delicate challenge for agencies that depend on trust in science to do their jobs. “Trust in science is high, but it’s not unanimous and it’s not completely unquestioned — and nor necessarily should it be,” Joseph Hilgard, an…

Beyond the numbers: What’s it like to have an unplanned pregnancy?

There’s a lot at stake for women’s health in the Republican plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, which eliminated out-of-pocket costs for birth control and has been highly successful in breaking down barriers to affordable family planning. The cost-sharing changes alone are saving individual women hundreds of dollars each year on their choice of contraception. So far, the Republican replacement proposal, known as the American Health Care Act, doesn’t impact the Obama-era contraception coverage provisions, nor does it touch other women’s health benefits, such as designating maternity care…

EPA announces first chemicals for “fast-track” under new chemical law - Selection highlights law's limitations and continuing role for states

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced the first five chemicals it will “fast-track” under the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety Act for the 21st Century (LCSA). The EPA now has until June 22, 2019 to identify where these chemicals – all considered persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic – are used, how exposures occur, and propose possible restrictions on their use. “The threats from persistent, bioaccumulative and toxic chemicals [PBTs] are well-documented,” Jim Jones, assistant administrator in EPA’s office of chemical safety and pollution prevention, explained in a…

Occupational Health News Roundup

In a joint investigation from the Texas Tribune and Houston Chronicle, reporters looked into workplace safety at oil refineries 10 years after an explosion at a BP refinery in Texas City, Texas, left 15 workers dead and injured another 180. Unfortunately, reporters found that “though no single incident has matched the 2005 devastation, a two-month investigation finds the industry’s overall death toll barely slowed.” In the four-part series, reporters chronicle what went wrong at the Texas City refinery, explore the aftermath and talk with survivors, and analyze data showing where and how…

Occupational Health News Roundup

It’s a toxic chemical that made headlines when it was linked to deaths and injuries among popcorn factory workers, and federal regulators are well aware of its dangers. But, unfortunately, diacetyl is still hurting workers. In “Gasping for Action,” reporter Raquel Rutledge at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel writes about diacetyl, a chemical that tastes like butter and is used in food products and e-cigarettes, and the dangers it continues to pose to workers who breath it in, particularly coffee workers. She writes: Coffee roasters sometimes add it to flavor coffee. High concentrations of…

FunGenEvoDevo

I got some email today with lots of constructive suggestions (See? Not all my email is evil!) for how we ought to change the education of biology students — such as by giving them a foundation in the history and philosophy of our science, using creationist arguments as bad examples so the students can see the errors for themselves, etc. — and it was absolutely brilliant, even the parts where he disagreed with some things I'd written before. Best email ever! Of course, what helped is that I spent my summer "vacation" putting together a new freshman first semester course for biology majors that…

SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling (and some other stuff)?

I liked Freakonomics, so I'm a bit sad to see the (inevitable) sequel being so hopelessly wrong. Probably this is a case of the old rule: whenever you see people write about stuff you know, they get it wrong. Joe Romm has a fairly characteristic attack; and just for a change I'll agree with him; though he chooses odd bits to assault. It looks like the "global cooling" junk is just one chapter, but of course it is the only one I'll pay any attention to. Diagnosis, in brief: (1) they write about stuff they clearly don't understand (2) they pick a catchy reverse-common-wisdom nugget as a…

Ruse on Religion

Michael Ruse has this interesting op-ed in the Florida newspaper The Tallahassee Democrat. He begins: This has been a good year for evolutionists. First, at the end of 2005, a judge in Pennsylvania - a conservative appointed by President George W. Bush - decreed that so-called Intelligent Design Theory is not genuine science and hence cannot be taught in publicly funded science classrooms. Intelligent Design Theory - Creationism Lite - is the latest attempt by religious fundamentalists, biblical literalists, to argue that the origins of organisms were not evolutionary but the result of…

Division of Labor Is a Good Thing for Science and Skepticism

Noted grouchy person John Horgan has found a new way to get people mad at him on the Internet, via a speech-turned-blog-post taking organized Skeptic groups to task for mostly going after "soft targets". This has generated lots of angry blog posts in response, and a far greater number of people sighing heavily and saying "There Horgan goes again..." If you want to read only one counter to Horgan's piece to get caught up, you could do a lot worse than reading Daniel Loxton's calm and measured response. Loxton correctly notes that Horgan's comments are nothing especially unique, just a variant…

Advent Calendar of Science Stories 23: Parity

For the penultimate advent calendar of science stories post, we'll turn to a great experimentalist with a great biography. This story also appears in Eureka: Discovering your Inner Scientist, but it's too good not to re-use. Chien-Shiung Wu was born in china in 1912, at right around the time education of women was first legalized. Her father founded a school for girls so he could teach her, then at around the age of 10 she went off to a boarding school, and then the best universities in the country, where she distinguished herself as one of the finest math and physics students in China. At…

Explaining the Higgs: on TV last night!

"We knew that we had indeed done something that was very different and very exciting, but we still didn't expect it to have something to do with physical reality." -Gerald Guralnik, co-developer of the Higgs mechanism Might as well make this entire week "Higgs week" here on Starts With A Bang, given how important yesterday's discovery/announcement was! It isn't every day, after all, that you see a theoretical physicist on the 7PM news. (Video here.) Image credit: KGW.com. (So proud of Portland, OR's local TV station, KGW NewsChannel 8, for being willing to promote science to the whole city…

Does Our Paleolithic Past Shape Our Modern Survival Instinct?

The latest National Geographic Roundtable Question: Survivor-style television has grown increasingly popular over the years and done a great job of illustrating our brain's fascinating built-in survival instinct. What role do you think our ancestral instincts play today in helping us survive, thrive and accomplish our goals? How much of our ancestral survival instincts are innate verses learned? First, the innate vs. learned part of the question. This is a false dichotomy. We have evolved to learn. We probably have "built in" mechanisms to learn new things. This means that when we have…