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The Growing Evidence of the Threat of Fracking to the Nation’s Groundwater

For some time now, proponents of the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” have claimed there was little or no evidence of real risk to groundwater. But as the classic saying goes: “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” of a problem. And the evidence that fracking can contaminate groundwater and drinking water wells is growing stronger with every new study. As most people now know, fracking is a method for enhancing the production of natural gas (or oil, or geothermal energy wells). Fracking involves injecting fluids -- typically complex mixes of water and…

Reducing Conflicts and Increasing Transparency: Why so difficult?

 By Susan F. Wood, PhD  Two things appear to be major bones of contention in determining the final version of what is now named the "FDA Revitalization Act of 2007" (FDARA).  And they both related to public transparency and public accountability.  The first is the limitation of financial conflicts of interest by FDA Advisory Committee members.  The House has adopted language that limits  the ability of FDA to grant waivers to members of Advisory Committees (AC) who have financial conflicts to only 1 waiver per meeting of a committee.  This was identical to an amendment offered on the…

25 Years After Bhopal, Too Little Progress

Liz and Celeste are on vacation, so we're re-posting some content from our old site. By Liz Borkowski, orginally posted 12/3/09 Twenty-five years ago, thousands of residents of Bhopal, India awoke in the middle of the night struggling to breathe. A Union Carbide pesticide plant had leaked 40 tons of methyl isocyanate, a highly toxic substance that had escaped in gas form and spread quickly through the densely populated city. The Indian Council on Medical Research estimates that between 8,000 and 10,000 people died in the first three days after the catastrophe; another 25,000 perished later…

Happy Birthday Opportunity!

Can you imagine driving around on roadless terrain with a four wheel drive vehicle for eight years and not ever changing a tire, getting a tuneup, adjusting the suspension, replacing the hydraulics or brakes, or doing any other service whatsoever on your vehicle? I've actually done that, and I'm here to tell you, you can't do that! But Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has, in fact, done it. Opportunity was tasked to took around on the Martian surface for three months. The Space Robot landed on Mars on January 25th, 2004. During the last eight years, Opportunity has traveled great…

Basic Concepts: Fast Break

The term "fast break" refers to those situations in the game of basketball in which the offense is attempting to push the ball up the court and score quickly, rather than running a play from their normal offensive set. This usually involves a temporary numerical advantage for the offensive team, as the defenders hurry to get back into position. Any given fast break will last no more than a few seconds, but these are some of the most important seconds in a basketball game. Understanding the basics of the fast break is absolutely essential to playing basketball, or even watching it played. For…

XMRV and chronic fatigue syndrome: So long, and thanks for all the lulz, Part II

ERV readers will absolutely love this paper. Recombinant Origin of the Retrovirus XMRV Okay, we all know ERVs are awesome evidence for evolution and common descent. But, imagine we could do classical ERV research one better. Imagine that we had DNA from one of THE common ancestors of humans and chimpanzees-- an ancestor who is the proud owner of a new ERV. Imagine we have its DNA, and the DNA of its parents, and the DNA of their parents. Then imagine we had the DNA of its children, and their children. Imagine the fun evolutionary research we could do, what we could see, with those kinds…

XMRV and chronic fatigue syndrome

XMRV is so hot right now. Read the paper on XMRV and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome last weekend: Detection of an Infectious Retrovirus, XMRV, in Blood Cells of Patients with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome My conclusions from the paper: XMRV is capable of infecting humans and producing viable progeny. How this fact relates to CFS, Im still not sure. Let me go through exactly what these researchers did. 1-- Nested PCR looking for XMRV genomes. Nested PCR is kinda 'better' than regular PCR, especially when we are talking about retroviruses. How do you know the signal you are seeing is because of XMRV,…

Hydraulic Drilling at AAAS: Fracking Annoying

I grew up in Broome County, NY, down by the PA border, and my parents still live in scenic Whitney Point. Broome County is one of the areas affected by a huge environmental controversy, because it sits on top of the northern bit of the Marcellus Shale formation, which contains huge amounts of natural gas. For years, this has been deemed too difficult and expensive to extract, but gas prices and drilling technology, specifically hydraulic fracture drilling where they pump large amounts of water down the hole to break up the rock and let the gas escape, have moved to a place where it's…

Ferreting out swine flu - virus causes slightly more severe disease than seasonal flu

The swine flu pandemic is well under way. With the WHO citing almost 60,000 laboratory-confirmed cases at the time of writing, the race is truly on to understand more about the virus. Now, two new studies have painted a fresh but partly contradictory picture about two of the virus's most important aspects - its infectivity (its ability to spread from host to host) and its virulence (its ability to cause disease in a host). These two traits will largely determine the threat that the virus poses, especially in relation to more familiar garden varieties of seasonal flu. Both groups, one based…

An Inordinate Fondness for Beetle Horns

Its strange enough that beetles grow horns. But its especially strange that beetles grow so many kinds of horns. This picture, which was published in the latest issue of the journal Evolution, shows a tiny sampling of this diversity. The species shown here all belong to the genus Onthophagus, a group of dung beetles. The colors in this picture, which are false, show which parts of the beetle body the horns grow from. Blue horns grow from the back of the head, red from the middle of the head, and purple from the front of the head. Green horns grow from the center of the body plate directly…

How Many Species 3: Finally, some answers.

Last Thursday, I presented some data about three populations of an insect and asked you to try and figure out how many species scientists think these populations should be grouped into. On Monday, I added data from two more populations, and asked the same thing - try and figure out how many species are present. Now, I'm going to try and answer the question myself, and tell you what other scientists have said about these insects. A quick review is probably in order before I get to the "answers": The five populations are arranged in a line, with each separated from the next by a minimum…

The Magic Touch: When vision lets you down

This is a guest post by Martina Mustroph, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007. When you're typing, your senses of touch, hearing, and sight align. You feel, see, and hear your fingers touch the keyboard. Now imagine that you are outdoors and you feel a drop of water hit your hand. If you are like me, then it probably immediately occurs to you that it was a raindrop, so you stretch out your hand to see if more will come, and you look up at the sky for menacing clouds. Let's say the sky is blue and clear as far as you can see. Now your senses of touch and sight are at odds: your…

Doing the math: how plausible is the claim that changing what you eat makes more difference to global warming than changing what you drive?

Dave Munger pointed me to an article in the New York Times that claims "switching to a plant-based diet does more to curb global warming than switching from an S.U.V. to a Camry." Dave is a critical consumer of information and notes that there is little given in this particular article (which appears in the "Media & Advertising" section) as far as numbers. As I'm not an agronomist, I don't have all the relevant numbers at my finger tips, but I'm happy to set up some equations into which reliable numbers can be plugged once they are located. First, there's some unclarity in the sentence…

194 years since the great Tambora eruption

Tambora, Indonesia There are big eruptions, then there are big eruptions. On April 10, 1815, Tambora, a volcano in Indonesia, produced one of the largest eruptions in human history. This eruption produced what became known as the "year without a summer" after the volcanic aerosols from the eruption produced some of the coldest summers in many parts of the world. The Tambora eruption in 1815 was a VEI 7, on a scale that goes to, well, 7*, putting it in a class of some of the largest and most violent eruptions imaginable - and I, for one, can hardly imagine what might happen if an eruption of…

Progress in flu science, 1918 - 2006

One frequent refrain about why we don't have to worry about a bird flu pandemic is the astounding progress we've made in medical science in the 88 years since 1918. It's a good point. In 1918 we didn't even know the causative agent. In this spirit I offer you an excerpt from a December 1918 report of the American Public Health Association's committee on influenza, sent to me by a loyal reader: It is the opinion of this committee that epidemic influenza is spread solely through the discharges from the nose and throat of infected persons finding their way into the nose and throat of susceptible…

Pregnancy and influenza planning

A letter from Philip Mortimer of the UK's Health Protection Agency to the CDC journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases, calls attention to an apparent increased risk for death from influenza among a subpopulation, pregnant women. Mortimer alerts us to the fact that most (all?) national contingency plans for pandemics do not take this into account. Mortimer cites literature from the 1918 pandemic that contains ominous figures: Bland reported on pregnant influenza patients in Philadelphia and elsewhere in the fall of 1918; of 337, 155 died [Bland PB. Influenza in its relation to pregnancy and…

From the Archives: Voodoo science: The road from foolishness to fraud by Robert Park

I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here. This one, of Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud, is from November 14, 2006. ======= This year, during my sabbatical, I'm really trying to read a lot of science non-fiction, as opposed to my usual diet of science…

Education and Medicine Weekly Channel Highlights

In this post: the large versions of the Education & Careers and Medicine & Health channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week. Medicine & Health. From Flickr, by conskeptical Education & Careers. From Flickr, by SantaRosa OLD SKOOL Reader comments of the week: On the Education & Careers channel, Janet Stemwedel has recently had a Minor epiphany about framing. The much-debated approach to science communication, she realized, is really designed to reach mass audiences; the blogosphere and the classroom can rely on more personal interaction to…

Environment and Humanities Weekly Channel Highlights

In this post: the large versions of the Environment and Humanities & Social Science channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week. Environment. From Flickr, by chaosinjune Humanities & Social Science. From Flickr, by (nutmeg) Reader comments of the week: In Is it all over for corals?, Peter Etnoyer of Deep Sea News reports a disheartening statistic: One in three species of coral faces extinction. Human activities like overfishing and agriculture, in addition to global warming, are largely to blame for the corals' decline. Is it already too late, Peter asks…

The stupid, it burns

The letters to the editor section of our local newspapers is where you find the proud regalia of the American boob in prominent display. Here's a fine example of creationist inanity from Dothan, Alabama. Try to count the misconceptions about evolution here. Grade school textbooks teach evolution as fact. It is a monstrous lie that harms our children. The evolution theory says we evolved from the original Big Bang and later crawled out of a green slime from the ocean. Here is one example of its ludicrous hypothesis. Of all the mysteries surrounding evolution, the one that is most baffling to…

Hey Framers, what do you think of this?

Here's an interesting article in BBC which suggests that more hysterical messages on climate change might fall on deaf ears. Professor Mike Hulme, of the UK's Tyndall Centre, has been conducting research on people's attitudes to media portrayals of a catastrophic future. He says strong messages designed to prompt people to change behaviour only seem to generate apathy. His initial findings will be shown to a meeting run by the British Association for the Advancement of Science. ... The study compared the responses of a group of people shown sensational media coverage with those given the more…

The Independent needs its environmental credentials to be taken away

Between electronic "smog" and their incessant bleating that every weather event is due to global warming, I have come to the conclusion that the Independent, with stories like this one, are trying to bring down the science of global warming from the inside. It's official: the heavier rainfall in Britain is being caused by climate change, a major new scientific study will reveal this week, as the country reels from summer downpours of unprecedented ferocity. More intense rainstorms across parts of the northern hemisphere are being generated by man-made global warming, the study has established…

High school students use DNA testing to spot fishy seafood

Two teenagers, Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss, carried out their own science project over the past year. They visited 4 restaurants and 10 grocery stores and gathered 60 samples of fish and sent them off to the University of Guelph to get sequenced. I like this story. One of my former students did a project like this for the FDA years ago, sampling fish from the Pike Place Market and identifying them with PCR. He was an intern, though. Here we have students identifying sushi on their own! Quoting the New York Times article: They found that one-fourth of the fish samples with…

Friday Fun: The Future of Books According to Science Fiction

A really interesting article on Tor.com from this past August by Ryan Britt, A Fondness for Antiques: The Future of Books According to Science Fiction. In the past few years, media pundits and tech experts have been abuzz with variations on the question: "what is the future of the book?" Luckily, science fiction has been around a whole lot longer than Amazon, Apple, and Google, and as such, might be able to teach us a thing or two about the future of the printed word. It's a really terrific look at some futurism from the past -- the old "Where's my rocket pack and flying car!" but this time…

Meet Marge: The World's First NonFat Dairy Cow

tags: nonfat dairy cow, marge To meet the demands of the health-conscious consumer, how about developing cows that produce skim milk? Well, scientists have identified a cow that does this, and they hope to establish herds of the animals to meet the increased health demands from the public. The cows, which carry a particular genetic mutation, were bred from a single female, named Marge, who was discovered by researchers when they screened milk from millions of cattle in New Zealand. "Marge looks like an ordinary Friesian cow but has three key differences. She produces a normal level of protein…

Sweden's Main Contract Archaeology Units To Merge With Main Archaeological Museum

Contract archaeology is the current term for what used to be called rescue archaeology: documenting archaeological sites slated for destruction through land development. (Swedes sometimes fall for a false friend and translate an old word of ours, exploateringsarkeologi, into “exploitation archaeology”, suggesting fieldwork undertaken by people in pimp/ho outfits to the soundtrack from Shaft.) Swedish contract archaeology has seen steady growth measured decade by decade since the end of WW2, both in terms of the number of active field archaeologists and of the number of units. I seem to…

Climate Lies

From RP Jr and Nurture. Well, not quite direct lies, more in the nature of deliberately-misleading by omission. But I have a work colleague who habitually accuses me of spreading climate lies (hello Hugo!) so it only seems fair to use the phrase myself. [From the Nature article,] It isn't quite possible to tell who is at fault: the quote from the review in Nurture is: In The Climate Fix, Pielke argues... Fright sells, he points out, citing the late Stephen Schneider, the environmental scientist and political adviser who once wrote that, to rouse public support, "we have to offer up scary…

Fluid Dynamics Is Weird: Bathroom Sink Edition

One of the things about being a physicist that makes it tough to have any sensible work-life balance is that I'm constantly seeing little things and thinking "Oooh! Physics!" then getting distracted from what I'm actually supposed to be doing. Take, for example, our bathroom sink. I have noticed, from time to time, a weird effect where the stream of water coming out of the faucet, which normally is fairly straight, will spread out when the water level in the container below gets close to the faucet. This turns out to be damnably difficult to replicate, though, and I've spent more time than I…

Another Day in the Life of The Twin Cities

Have you ever visited a culture entirety different than your own (or even moderately different, like you're from New York and you visit Kentucky, or you're from Belgium and you visit Italy)? You will see things .... things people do differently, right away. Then you leave and you figure these things are what 'they' ... the people in that culture do. And you are probably right most of the time. But one or two of your observations might have been spurious. You observe an outlier ... an odd behavior, an odd person, whatever. In fact, I think that this happens far more often than people…

Halevi on the War in Gaza

In the Washington Post, Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi has a moving take on the conflict in Gaza. His nineteen year old son is in the Israeli army, you see. A majority of Israelis emerged from the first intifada convinced that we need to do everything possible to end the occupation and ensure that our children don't serve as enforcers of Gaza's despair. That was why I initially supported the 1993 Oslo peace process that took a terrible gamble on Yasser Arafat's supposed transformation from terrorist to peacemaker. And even after it became clear that Arafat and other Palestinian leaders…

Rise Up: Blogroll Amnesty Day

Yesterday was the 1st anniversary of Blogroll Amnesty Day, originally proposed by a reasonably prominent blogger who used the occasion to relieve himself of guilt when purging his blogroll and building back up only a list of those he reads regularly. I learned via my new homies, PhysioProf and DrugMonkey that Jon Swift and Skippy have proposed this day instead as an opportunity for low-traffic bloggers to blogroll even lower-traffic bloggers to help everyone rise up in notoriety. Despite being here at ScienceBlogs for 20 months, I have managed to keep my readership to a small but select…

When Readers Comment (1/15/08)

In response my book review of Russell Korobkin's Stem Cell Century, John Thacker responded: The sad fact of the matter is that Korobkin may have identified the moral premise underlying Bush Administration policy generally, not just for stem cell research. A similar moral premise seems to be at work to justify CIA rendition. Hmm, does that mean that it was also a moral premise underlying Clinton Administration policy, since the Clinton Administration also performed CIA rendition? More generally, the philosophical principle that one need not "refuse to benefit from the fruits of bad acts…

Winners of the 2012 Bio-Art competition

The 10 winning images from the inaugural Bio-Art competition hosted by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) were announced last week. Here are my favorites:    Closely related species of electric fish with recordings of their electric organ discharge. This organ is used for communication and prey location, similar to echolocation used by bats. Note how the pattern differs between species. Submitted by Matthew E. Arnegard (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA), Derrick J. Zwickl (University of Kansas, Lawrence) as well as Ying Lu and Harold H.…

Coming Soon: Written in Stone

As some of you may recall, last week I posted a list of new and forthcoming books written by science bloggers. I tried to include all the authors and titles I could think of, but there was one book that I intentionally left off the list; my own. I am now proud to announce that my first book, Written in Stone, will be released by Bellevue Literary Press in the fall of 2010. In it I tell the stories of some of the most magnificent evolutionary transitions in the vertebrate fossil record, such as the evolution of birds from feathered theropod dinosaurs and whales from land-dwelling ancestors,…

Household Hamsters: Potential Vectors

According to the CDC, there is a risk of pet hamsters harboring some darn serious pathogens.   class="inset" style="border: 0px solid ; width: 460px; height: 345px;" alt="CC license: share alike, attribution" title="by Yukari*, some rights reserved." src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/47/121153744_1a08613c1e_o.jpg"> photo credit: href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/yukariryu/121153744/">Yukari. Hamsters, technically Class: Mammalia; Order: Rodentia; Suborder: Myomorpha; Superfamily: Muroidea; Family: Cricetidae; Subfamily: Cricetinae, are cute little pets that people…

Friday Sprog Blogging: science fair brainstorming.

As I mentioned yesterday, the elder Free-Ride offspring will be participating in the school science fair this year. Last night at the dinner table, the Free-Ride family started brainstorming project ideas. Elder offspring: I was thinking about seeing how well plants grow in different kinds of water. Dr. Free-Ride: That might be interesting. Elder offspring: I could use tap water, water from the Brita, mineral water, ... Younger offspring: Soda. Dr. Free-Ride: OK, you might find something out from that comparison. But I'm not buying bottled water from the garden -- not even in a deep drought…

Live blogging a tornado

Well, that was interesting. We are having turbulent weather here in Minnesota. The current low pressure system passing across the US is sitting on us like a bullet on a bull's eye. Almost every line of storm activity is breaking into small blobs which in turn are spinning up wall clouds and twisters, mostly small, mostly only on radar, mostly not touching down. Except the one that is currently bearing down on Coon Lake Beach and Forest Lake. It was spotted on a traffic cam earlier, seen by some spotters, damaged a shopping mall, and hit the small airport we have down the road from here.…

The creationist quote-mining reflex

The Paleyists at Uncommon Descent seem to be having a competition to find the most awful thing Darwin ever said. It's not hard, actually; Darwin was a conventional 19th century Englishman, with all the standard prejudices of his day, tending to assume that Anglo-Saxons were superior in most ways to every other ethnic group on the planet. It's darned easy to browse through the Descent of Man and find casual assumptions that make us cringe today. So what? We can recognize that Darwin was a flawed human being and a brilliant scientist. What is bizarre, though, is how some creationists simply…

Stop the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline

Earlier this week, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman warned Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a letter that approving the Keystone XL pipeline would be "a step in the wrong direction" and criticized the State Department's limited environmental impact statement about the pipeline. The proposed pipeline would transport 900,000 barrels of oil a day nearly 2,000 miles from Alberta, Canada to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries. The project is currently undergoing the State Department's review process since all transnational pipelines must be approved by the State Department as…

The Universe Is Slightly Different Than Expected

When certain space ships travel by the Earth they seem to demonstrate a shift in velocity that is not predicted. Space ships traveling parallel to the Earth's Equator do not seem to show this anomaly; It appears to be most readily observed in those that travel in a path unsymmetrical with respect to the equator. The following is from a report filed with Physics News Update in September, 1998: ANOMALOUS ACCELERATION. Data from several spacecraft, including Pioneer 10 and 11, Galileo, and Ulysses, provide evidence for an unexplained, weak, long-range acceleration, a new report shows.…

Africa Fighting Malaria attacks Bayer

This editorial from Africa Fighting Malaria contains the usual misleading statements about what happened in South Africa and the usual false claim about the EU threatening to ban imports from Uganda. But it adds this attack on Bayer: The obstacles to good malaria control unfortunately do not end there. Big business also plays a distasteful role in this saga. Recently, the Financial Times reported that Gerhard Hesse, business manager for vector control of Bayer Crop Sciences and a board member of the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, wrote an e-mail to various health academics claiming: "We…

Blair to Bolt to Parkinson

One of the many factual errors in Parkinson's piece on deaths in Iraq was the claim that the Lancet study only surveyed 788 households (actually it was 988 households). I did a Google search to see who else had made the same error, and what do you know, it first appeared in a error-filled May 25 article by Andrew Bolt: Lancet surveyed 788 Iraqi households. The UN surveyed 21,668 -- or almost 30 times more. You figure which is more accurate. Parkinson's column was drafted just two days after Bolt's, and like Bolt he failed to mention that the ILCS only covered the first year of the…

Best of the Cheerful Oncologist - Footsteps

[Editor's note: The C. O. is jetting off to New York for the weekend (just one week before the big ScienceBloggers get-together - so much for timely planning). To kill time he asked us to reprint this little reflection, written on July 24, 2005 while he was vacationing Up North. So while he visits some of the Big Apple's world famous attractions (without his laptop, alas) we give you this fluff.] Five generations of my family have summered up here in the northern aspen and beech forests. Strolling around the sparse, loamy grass, or lounging by the water under the soft shade of the pines,…

Lott misrepresents Kleck's research on resistance

As well as making the highly misleading claim that women are 2.5 times as likely to be injured if they offer no resistance than resisting with a gun as I discussed yesterday, in The Bias Against Guns Lott claims (page 99): Carrying a gun is also the safest course of action when one is confronted by a criminal.6 Endnote 6 states: Gary Kleck and Don Kates (288-290) present the most recent data from the Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey from 1992 to 1998 and also indicate that the risk of serious injury from a criminal attack is…

Bacterial Lightbulb

This year's Cambridge iGEM team has made a tiny, wireless lightbulb filled with bioluminescent bacteria! There are two main ways of engineering luminescence in E. coli (I assume these are E. coli, correct me if I'm wrong!). One is to express the luciferase gene from fireflies, which adds ATP and oxygen to the chemical luciferin, producing oxyluciferin and yellow, green, or red light. Since the lightbulb is blue, this bacteria is probably expressing the Lux operon from Vibrio fischeri, which use their bioluminescence in an awesome underwater symbiosis. From the Cambridge iGEM wiki: Some…

Genes predict the ancestry of African-Americans

I'm in the middle of a longer post on a recent paper on the effects of genetics on gene expression differences in African-Americans, which has also been well-covered by p-ter at Gene Expression. I wanted to post this section separately to avoid detracting from the issues in that post. This figure will not provide any big surprises for those who have been following developments in human genetics over the last five years - but it still provides a compelling illustration of the power of genetics to predict individual ancestry: The figure shows the results obtained when the European, Nigerian…

Hawks is, well, Hawkish

You all (or y'all or yins or whatever) know about the article in Science that says Americans are dumber than everyone on Earth except the Turkish (see the concise version from the NYTimes if you don't have access to Science). It's because we don't know jack shit about evolution. And we don't know jack shit about evolution because we don't know jack shit about genetics. Evolution? Genetics? I ain't interested in those things. Nope. I'm probably the only ScienceBlogs blogger who didn't offer his 3¢ (inflation, bitches) on this issue. If I had, I would have written what John Hawks wrote, only…

Loony Climate Denialism Holdouts

A small group of US experts stubbornly insist that, contrary to what the vast majority of their colleagues believe, humans may not be responsible for the warming of the planet Earth. 3,000 experts, including several renown US scientists, jointly won the award with former US vice president Al Gore for their work to raise awareness about the disastrous consequences of global warming. In mid-November the IPCC adopted a landmark report stating that the evidence of a human role in the warming of the planet was now "unequivocal." Retreating glaciers and loss of snow in Alpine regions, thinning…

Swine flu---don't panic

So far, it looks like the US Gov't is on top of this one. If you're interested in following along with the story, I strongly suggest following the Effect Measure blog. The writers know their stuff, and so far, government websites aren't all that much health. Some basics: As you remember, the flu virus changes over time due to "antigenic drift" and we need to make new vaccines every year. Sometimes, often due to multiple strains co-infecting the same animal, the influenza genome undergoes a more dramatic change called "antigenic shift". Influenza A is commonly found in birds, pigs, and…

The Whale

Herman Melville has nothing on the researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography. For one thing, you can read their article in the time it takes to leisurely eat a banana... I could never get past the first sentence of Moby Dick. It all started when Delphine "Ishmel" Mathias and Aaron "Ahab" Thode from Scripps were called on by a snarling mob of Alaskan cod-fishermen who demanded something be done about their missing cod. The belligerent fishermen reported seeing groups of sperm whales loitering around some of their equipment and cod missing from their lines. Since sperm whales usually…