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Worrying about the near term

Much is being made of a new paper in Nature Geoscience in which the authors recalculate "Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °C." Whether the authors are justified in their marginally optimistic conclusions — and there's plenty of debate about that — there really isn't much in the way of policy guidance here. Just look at this money quote in Nature: “The Paris goal of 1.5 °C is not impossible — it’s just very, very difficult,” says lead author Richard Millar, a climate researcher at the University of Oxford, UK. Or as Millar and his colleagues put in in their…

Life Science & Physical Science Weekly Channel Update

Getting back in the swing of things with Channel posts, what's inside: The large versions of the Life Sciences and Physical Sciences channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week. Life Science. This cuttlefish was thrilled to celebrate International Cephalopod Appreciation Day on October 8. From Flickr, by Pear Biter It always amazes me when creatures such as these are captured on camera. This one looks rather curious. Physical Science. A long-exposure photo of momentum in action. From Flickr, by velo steve When I first looked at this picture I thought there…

What's New on ScienceBlogs.de, April 3-9

What's buzzing this week in science and science-blog news in Europe? Wonder no more: it's this week's top stories from our partner site, ScienceBlogs.de: Bovine New World? A team of scientists from Newcastle, England has succeeded in creating hybrid embryos from bovine ova and human nuclei from skin cells (something PZ Myers at scienceblogs.com has been looking forward to for months!) Instantly, the research press release mutated into a Europe-wide ethics panel—which Tobias Maier at WeiterGen dauntlessly chooses to ignore: "The outcry is enormous, but I'm not committing myself to that...I…

Digital Biology Friday: How similar are apes and humans?

During these past couple of weeks, we've been comparing mitochondrial DNA sequences from humans and great apes, in order to see how similar the sequences are. Last week, I got distracted by finding a copy of a human mitochondrial genome, that somehow got out of a mitochondria, and got stuck right inside of chromosome 17! The existence of this extra mitochondrial sequence probably complicates some genetic analyses. One of my readers also asked an interesting question about whether apes have a similar mitochondrial sequence in their equivalent of chromosome 17, and how it compares. We will…

Bird flu in poultry: it's not over even when the Fat Lady sings

In the world of opera a diva is a prima donna, often problematic in behavior, but in the world of bird flu, DIVA stands for differentiating infected from vaccinated animals (DIVA). The bird flu DIVA relates to a problematic behavior of vaccinating poultry: after you've artificially induced them to produce antibodies against bird flu, you are faced with the trying to tell if a bird with antibodies against bird flu got it artificially or naturally. Since antibody detection is the main screening method for poultry infection with avian influenza virus most countries won't accept imports of…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

The Severity of Pandemic H1N1 Influenza in the United States, from April to July 2009: A Bayesian Analysis: Accurate measures of the severity of pandemic (H1N1) 2009 influenza (pH1N1) are needed to assess the likely impact of an anticipated resurgence in the autumn in the Northern Hemisphere. Severity has been difficult to measure because jurisdictions with large numbers of deaths and other severe outcomes have had too many cases to assess the total number with confidence. Also, detection of severe cases may be more likely, resulting in overestimation of the severity of an average case. We…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Wow! It seems that all the exciting sience news today are coming from my school: Researchers Find Genes Involved In Nicotine Resistance In Fruit Flies: North Carolina State University researchers have gleaned insight into the genes involved in resistance to nicotine in the lab rat of many gene studies - Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly. The research team led by Dr. Greg Gibson, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Genetics, and his graduate student, Gisele Passador-Gurgel, found that regulation of levels of a certain enzyme - ornithine amino transferase - plays an important role in…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Days before the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the New York Times published an article about respirators. This protective equipment was intended to protect response and recovery workers at Ground Zero, but often failed to do so because of discomfort, inadequate training, or unsuitable equipment. Thousands were exposed to airborne contaminants, and many have become sick. In the years since, federal agencies and equipment manufacturers have been working on developing new certification standards for respirator masks and assuring they can be used by workers responding to…

Pollution: not “an unavoidable consequence” of development

The headlines are grabbing people's attention: CBC News: "Pollution causing more deaths worldwide than war or smoking"; CNN: "Pollution linked to 9 million deaths worldwide in 2015, study says"; BBC: "Pollution linked to one in six deaths";  Associated Press: "Pollution killing more people every year than wars, disaster and hunger, study says";  The Independent: "Pollution is killing millions of people a year and the world is reaching 'crisis point', experts warn." News outlets are referring to a report released yesterday by The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health. The report’s authors…

New Frontiers: Big Questions Conference I

A slow liveblog of the conference. The New Frontiers in Astronomy and Comsology is having its awards conference at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. The 20 odd winning researchers and research groups are presenting summaries of their proposed research, to be followed in a couple of years with another conference in Chicago where they will, hopefully, present their results. The high school and college essay winners are also here to receive their awards and schmooze with the random astroboffins. I plan to do my usual intermittent blogging of the presentations, time permitting. The list…

ExSSII: Extreme Solar Systems Direct Imaging

And we're off again with session 4 and direct imaging of exoplanets I think we had about 100 total new exoplanets announced yesterday: 55 from CORALIE/HARPS, 23 from WASP, 12 from Kepler, 10 from PSU-Torun and assorted others. I zonked out on the evening debate on ηEarth last night, chaired by Andrew Howard. The interesting thing is that when I were a lad, oh so many years ago, the debate would have been about the LOG(η). Optimists might have argued for 10-1, and pessimists for 10-6 or less for fraction of stars with Earth like planets. Now the argument is pretty much focused on whether it…

Demanding women deliver dead babies is unethical and unsafe

In a debate on the floor of the Georgia State house over a bill to force women to bring all pregnancies after 20 weeks to term, even in cases of dead or non-viable fetus, this Georgia representative reaches a new low. State Rep Terry England seems to be suggesting pigs and cows do it, why can't humans? Rep. Terry England compares women to cows, pigs and chickens. from Bryan Long on Vimeo. Aside from this genius on-the-farm reasoning of Mr England, the failures of reasoning and misrepresentations of scientific knowledge engaged in to pursue this legislation are many. The legislation is…

Sacrificing health for art

I realize art is, of course, subjective. I know what I like; sometimes I can explain why, and sometimes I'm not sure what it is about a piece that draws me to it. Certainly good art evokes emotion and can stir controversy and push limits. And like the notorious virgin Mary/elephant dung uproar, an undergrad at Yale has recently caused quite a stir with her own senior art project: Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself "as often as possible" while periodically taking…

Do I Expect Too Much of MSHA?

Last Wednesday, June 20, I learned from a newspaper reporter that a gold miner was missing at the Newmont company's Midas mine near Winnemucca, Nevada.  I checked MSHA's website, but nothing was posted about the accident.  No problem, I'll cut them some slack.  Maybe within 24 hours they'd provide some details.  By Friday, there was still no news offered by MSHA, so I began to rely on the Newmont company's website and updates posted on the local Las Vegas TV stations (KVBC and KLAS).  (The TV stations' stories provided no more information than that contained in the company's…

The Egnor Analogy

Michael Egnor is to "argument from analogy" as a fish is to __________. A. Fire B. Victorian Literature C. Mathematics D. Water Imagine scientists living on an isolated island who have developed sophisticated science and culture, with one exception: they deny that telecommunication is possible. For assorted reasons, they deny that the human voice can be transmitted through space, except as vibrations in air. We'll call this civilization the 'Verizon Deniers.' One day, they find a cell phone (it dropped from a plane or something). They turn it on, and they hear things. They hear hissing,…

This little piggy went ploughing (babirusas, part V)

The bipedal 'boxing' behaviour of babirusas is odd, but arguably odder is a unique sort of 'ploughing' behaviour they've recently been shown to practise. On being presented with an area of soft sand, captive babirusas (mostly males) have been noted to kneel down and push their head and chest forward through the sand, the result being a deep furrow. One obscure report from the 1970s suggests that Sulawesi people associated babirusas with the creation of straight-line furrows. Possible babirusa furrows were reported from south-eastern Sulawesi in 2002, but this behaviour has otherwise gone…

Return from Tropiquaria

I've said it before and I'm sure I'll be saying it again: one of the best ways to invigorate your enthusiasm about a subject is to attend a conference on it, and to spend at least a couple of days talking with other people about that subject. I've (more or less) just returned from the third Big Cats in Britain conference, held at Tropiquaria at Watchet, north Somerset. What an amazing venue: picture, if you can, a 1930s BBC radio station [adjacent image shows the stonework above the main entrance] surrounded by gigantic towering antennae, the heat radiating from one of the antennae being…

Connectedness

Next stop on our tour of topology is the idea of *connectedness*. It's an important concept that defines a lot of useful and interesting properties of topological spaces. The basic idea of connectedness is very simple and intuitive. If you think of a topology on a metric space like ℜ3, what connectedness means is, quite literally, connectedness in the physical sense: a space is connected if doesn't consist of two or more pieces that never touch. Being more formal, there are several equivalent definitions: * The most common one is the definition in terms of open and closed sets. It's…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 9 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. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Snake Cathelicidin from Bungarus fasciatus Is a Potent Peptide Antibiotics: Cathelicidins are a family of antimicrobial peptides acting as multifunctional effector molecules of innate immunity, which are firstly found in mammalians. Recently, several cathelicidins have also been found from chickens and fishes. No cathelicidins from other non-mammalian…

Elsevier steals, then copyrights other people's free stuff

Reed Elsevier caught copying my content without my permission: I was not asked for, and did not give, permission for my work to appear on that page, much less in that format. Needless to say, I felt a little slighted. The website in question appears to be a custom version of the LexisNexis search engine. This particular version appears to be Elsevier's own custom version, intended for internal use. I don't have conclusive proof of that, but the title bar at the top of the page reads, "Elsevier Corporate", and the person who accessed my blog from that page had an IP address that's registered…

My picks from ScienceDaily

One Species' Entire Genome Discovered Inside Another's: Scientists at the University of Rochester and the J. Craig Venter Institute have discovered a copy of the entire genome of a bacterial parasite residing inside the genome of its host species. The finding, reported in Science August 30, suggests that lateral gene transfer--the movement of genes between unrelated species--may happen much more frequently between bacteria and multicellular organisms than scientists previously believed, posing dramatic implications for evolution. More... Fruit Flies Prefer Fizzy Drinks: That fruit fly…

Fruit Bats Found to be Infected with Deadly Marburg Virus

tags: researchblogging.org, Egyptian Rousette, Egyptian fruit bat, Rousettus aegyptiacus, Marburg hemorrhagic fever virus, Ebola hemorrhagic fever virus, Uganda, zoonoses, pathogen Portrait of an Egyptian Rousette or Egyptian fruit bat, Rousettus aegyptiacus. Image: Wikipedia Like something out of a sci-fi novel, a man from Uganda died a horrible, bloody death from Marburg hemorrhagic fever this past July. As a result, scientists from the USA and the African nation of Gabon raced to the area to search for the source of this disease, and they may have finally discovered it. The team tested…

KiTP: Shock Planetary Discovery Announcement

Surprise discovery announcement at the Exoplanet UpRising workshop! In a dramatic change in schedule, Fieffe Menteur, a junior researcher at the French Academy for Keplerian Exoplanets broke embargo and revealed the first discovery of a habitable exoplanet! Dateline 2010-04-01: The object, tentatively named Matsya seems to be a warm Super-Ganymede, orbiting a Warm Giant Planet, tentatively named Navistan in the habitable zone of a K3VIz star HD234789 - to be announced as CoRoT-26bc, aka KOI-13bc (according to NASA anyway) in a pair of joint papers to appear in a journal of Science today.…

Chinese factory-fire victim turned activist to be honored by world's largest public health group

The New York Times headline read "Fire Ravages a Doll Factory In Southern China, Killing 81."  It was November 1993, the city was Shenzhen and the location was the Zhili toy factory.   Ms. Yuying Chen, 17, was one of 250 workers in the factory.  Like many others, she had traveled from her rural farming community to the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone to work in a manufacturing plant.  She dutifully sent money back home to her family.  When the fire broke out, the workers found the doors and windows locked making escape difficult.   Ms. Chen suffered third-degree burns over 75 percent of her…

Did CDC ban those airline blankets?

Within 15 minutes of my 6:00 am flight from Austin to Baltimore, I knew it was going to be a long, COLD, 3-hour trip. I'd already turned off the overhhad vents to stop the frigid air from blowing on me, and contorted myself into a ball on my seat trying to stay warm. As I visualized myself lounging in the hot sun, my light slumber was interrupted by a "DING!" coming from some seat ahead of me. Two rows up, a passenger had depressed the flight attendant call button to summon the Southwest Airlines crew member. "May I get a blanket?" the woman passenger asked. Like me, she must have felt the…

How Do Older Things End Up Buried Under Newer Ones?

Tomas Romson asked me a good question. Why do archaeological layers form in such a way that older things end up buried below newer ones? The answer is, because people and natural processes deposit dirt on the ground. Using a word borrowed from geology, we call the study of such layers stratigraphy. Imagine a Neolithic family who build a house on virgin land and live there for some decades. At the end of this phase there are a number of stinky middens and remains of the house on the site. These materials get compacted by microbial activity and mucked around by wildlife, and eventually form a…

Summer ice in the arctic has recovered

This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic. Objection: Sea ice at the north pole recovered a whopping 9.4% from 2007 to 2008 despite the doom and gloom predictions of the alarmists. Yet another wheel falls off the global warming bandwagon. Answer: It is true that the minimum summer ice extent in the arctic ocean in 2008 was 9.4% higher than the minimun in 2007. But calling this a recovery is simply not justifiable, not even by a long shot. Firstly, at 4.52 million square kilometers, this…

The Plight of Upstate

The Dean Dad has some interesting comments regarding this depressing New York Times article about the departure of young adults from Upstate New York: From 1990 to 2004, the number of 25-to-34-year-old residents in the 52 counties north of Rockland and Putnam declined by more than 25 percent. In 13 counties that include cities like Buffalo, Syracuse and Binghamton, the population of young adults fell by more than 30 percent. In Tioga County, part of Appalachia in New York's Southern Tier, 42 percent fewer young adults were counted in 2004 than in 1990. This echoes the article about the…

Weekend Diversion: Your Unreliable View

"The senses deceive from time to time, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once." -Rene Descartes Happy New Year, everyone! While many of you are still awestruck at the image of the Universe compressed into a single year, it's time to move forward to the next thing. For those of you new to the game, as is tradition around here, every weekend I come to you with some music you may not have heard before and some important, fun, interesting, or educational thing to amuse you. To start this year off right, I bring you Tim O'Brien's upbeat song, Turning Around.…

Global warming's effects are coming on faster than previously thought.

Arctic sea ice decline happened faster than expected. This has the effect of accelerating global warming because less of the Sun's energy is reflected back into space by ice. Northern Hemisphere snow also sends some of that energy back into space. The amount of snow cover we have is also declining. Difference from average annual snow extent since 1971, compared to the 1966-2010 average (dashed line). Snow extents have largely been below-average since the late1980s. Graph adapted from Figure 1.1 (h) in the 2012 BAMS State of the Climate report. The warming of the Arctic region is also…

Bring him to me!

The Milky Way galaxy is a relatively big spiral galaxy. So is Andromeda. There are about 20 dwarf galaxies that are gravitationally bound to us; combined with us, all of this makes up the local group. But Andromeda is moving towards us, and eventually, it's going to merge with us. I'll once again show you a video of what this merger might look like: But what would we see, here in the Milky Way, as Andromeda got closer and closer to us? Right now, Andromeda looks like this: But Andromeda is also very far away: about 2.3 million light years (770 kpc). The center of it is tiny on the sky, but…

Over 1,000 dead from the Swine Flu. And...?

The Wall Street Journal has just reported that over 1,000 people in the Americas, according to data released by the World Health Organization, have died from the Swine Flu. They seem to think you should be alarmed. The global A/H1N1 swine flu pandemic has claimed 1,154 lives since the outbreak was identified in April, data published by the World Health Organization showed Wednesday. The Geneva-based health agency also said that the number of laboratory-confirmed cases stood at 162,380 worldwide as of July 31. The WHO has estimated that 2 billion people, or one in three of the world's…

Article on UC lawsuit

The Economist has an article on the UC lawsuit available on their website. They tie tha suit together with Dover and Cupertino: So far the UC case has had less publicity than the argument about whether high schools can teach "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolution (currently being fought out in a courtroom in Pennsylvania) or even a ferocious dispute up in Cupertino, where a history teacher claims he was restrained from teaching about Christianity's role in American history (parents had complained that he was acting more like an evangelical preacher). In fact, all these arguments…

Evolution, Atheism and Perspective

Phillip Johnson, the chief architect of the intelligent design movement, famously said that the primary strategy of that movement is "to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate from creationism vs. evolution to the existence of God vs. the non-existence of God." In a nation where upwards of 90% of the population believes in God, this is good public relations strategy; it is also, however, a rather dishonest way to frame the dispute. Ken Miller described the reason why quite well in an interview with Christianity Today last year: It is always the case,…

Help Ben Study Medieval Scabbard Chapes

Here's a guest entry by my correspondent Ben Bishop who's doing a project on Medieval scabbard mounts using data from the Portable Antiquites Scheme (PAS). ----- I am researching medieval English scabbard chapes formed of folded copper alloy. They date from the period c. AD 1050–1300. The overwhelming majority are fragmentary when found and recognisable by the most decorative elements (shield for the mounted warrior, dragon head for the winged dragon). They are spread across England, including the Isle of Wight. The counties that are richest in these objects are Wiltshire (particularly L…

Saving the American Chestnut tree from extinction with GMOs

A fungus plague has been attacking the American Chestnut tree population for over 100 years now. Scientists have been trying everything to save the tree from extinction. I wrote about one approach back in 2009: Virus helps save the American Chestnut tree Really innovative idea-- Infect fungal infected trees with fungus... infected with a virus. The virus infects the infecting fungus, and weakens it so the trees immune system can kill it. Very cool, but complicated. The other idea I mentioned in that post was to cross-breed the American tree (susceptible to the fungus) with its Chinese cousin…

Food woo bites the dust

I am not a 'fan' of dietary sensationalism. A can of Mountain Dew made with high fructose corn syrup once a week is not going to kill you. Megadoses of various vitamins and minerals is not going to 'cure' you. People who demonize or canonize food annoy me. Funny enough, we have examples of both today, from 'pop'-news (har har) sources! Raw milk is not a panacea. Its full of bacteria that make you sick, stupid! Raw milk causes most illnesses from dairy, study finds CDC: Raw milk to blame for most dairy-related disease outbreaks Yes, those are actually anti-food-woo articles in USA TODAY and…

From Sharks to Soybeans-- Squalamine as an antiviral

File this under "Maybe Nifty, Maybe Nothing"-- A couple decades ago, scientists found a compound in the liver of sharks that turned out to be anti-cancer and anti-microbial-- squalamine. Though its not the most popular component of the 'SHARKS DONT GET CANCER!!!!' myth you might have heard of, it is a part of it. Just Google 'shark liver oil' to see the wooers eat it up (literally). Pharmaceutical grade squalamine (artificially synthesized in a lab from soybeans, not squeezed out of a thousand shark livers) might, at some point, be a useful antiviral: Squalamine as a broad-spectrum systemic…

How Does the Pulse Meter on Our Exercise Bike Work?

Unlike the previous post, this is not a rhetorical question that I will ask and then answer. I genuinely do not know the answer. I could Google it, of course, but I'd like to see if somebody reading this is able to deduce the correct answer from the available evidence. So, here's the deal: as an attempt to recover from a rather sedentary couple of months due to computer-based work and some plantar fascitis kind of problem in my foot that's keeping me from playing hoops as much as I'd like, I'm spending a while each day on the exercise bike we have upstairs. While I do a bunch of reading of…

Tangled Bank 83

[More blog entries about science, medicine, biology, carnival, tangledbank; vetenskap, biologi, medicin.] Welcome to Aardvarchaeology and the 83rd Tangled Bank blog carnival! This is the blog where all of science -- natural, social and historical -- is just seen as one big bunch of adjunct disciplines to the study of societies of the past. "What about medicine?", I hear you ask. It is very good for prolonging the working lives of archaeologists. "Physics?" We do need dating methods, you know. "Zoology?" Help us classify faunal remains and reconstruct ancient economy. "Astronomy?" It'll get…

Interesting Exchange with an ACLJ Attorney

I recently joined the religion law listserv, administered by Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy (archive here). I joined it because, obviously, I'm very fascinated by constitutional law, especially by the jurisprudence that has grown up around the religion clauses of the first amendment, and because the list includes many of the most prominent legal scholars writing on that subject. I don't post much there, I mostly just read the posts because I am not a legal scholar myself. But yesterday I sent a message to the list asking for opinions on the Steven Williams case in Cupertino,…

Now Behe is thrown to the wolves

At least one metaphorical wolf, that is: Richard Dawkins reviews The Edge of Evolution (behind the NYT Select paywall, sorry). Again, he focuses on the argument from improbability that is at the heart of Behe's book, and he comes up with a clear counter-example: if Behe were right, the modifications achieved by plant and animal domestication would be impossible. If mutation, rather than selection, really limited evolutionary change, this should be true for artificial no less than natural selection. Domestic breeding relies upon exactly the same pool of mutational variation as natural…

USVI: A Good Long Walk

Our vacation in the Virgin Islands was with family, so we spent most of our time in a group of six people, and there was no small element of cat-herding involved in getting things arranged. This tends to drive me up the wall, so I made a point of spending one morning doing something that didn't require me to wait on anybody else: I hiked the Caneel Hill Trail: (The sign in the picture is actually near the end of the hike that I did, but it shows the trail clearly.) The trail really starts in Cruz Bay, but I picked it up where it intersects the Lind Point Trail, just up the hill from where we…

Abrupt Climate Change, Past, Present, and Future

Dr. Lonnie Thompson of THE Ohio State University spoke at Union Wednesday night as part of the Environmental Studies Seminar Series on Abrupt Climate Change. Dr Thompson is an eminent climate scientist, and has spent thirty-ish years doing research on glaciers around the world, and what I learned from his talk is that I'll never make it as a single-issue blogger. His talk was basically an overview of what we can learn from ice cores, taken from a variety of palces all around the world, and what we learn is that the 20th century was a pretty unique time, climate-wise. There were lots and lots…

Uncomfortable Question: Worth the Tuition?

Continuing with the uncomfortable questions, H asks a good one: Union is one of the most expensive colleges in the country. What are students getting for their money? How does Union justify the increase in price over other schools with comparable academics and facilities? See, now that's an uncomfortable question, especially on an institutional level. Stripped down to the most basic level, and stated as bluntly as possible, students at an elite private liberal arts college are paying for three things: faculty/facilities, individual attention, and connections. Faculty and facilities are the…

An Old Fashioned Creationist Quote Mine!

During my recent trip to the Creation Museum I picked up a copy of David DeWitt's book Unraveling the Origins Controversy. DeWitt is the Director of the Center for Creation Studies at Liberty University. It's been a while since I've read an actual YEC book, and I was growing nostalgic for the experience. And wouldn't you know it! Almost as soon as DeWitt turns from religious questions to scientific ones, the quote-mining begins. Consider this: Often the evidence that is used to support common ancestry is the similarities between organisms. Mayr explained: Since all members of a taxon…

Gathering for Gardner 9

Don't see this at very many math conferences: This is from the Gathering for Gardner, which took place last week in Atlanta. That's Martin Gardner, who wrote the “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American for thirty years. He also wrote prolifically about magic and psuedoscience. Or perhaps I should say “writes” since he is still producing new work at ninety-five. I was honored to receive an invitation based on Gardner's endorsement of my book. I gave a short talk about the Monty Hall problem on the first day, which seemed to be well-received. For me the highlight of the…

Ask Sciencewomen: how can we do more inclusive recruiting into US national labs?

I recently got an email from a colleague, Rebecca Hartman-Baker, who works at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the National Center for Computational Sciences, and who would like some thoughts from you all on the following questions and context: A colleague and I are holding a Birds of a Feather session (BoF) at the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing in April (http://tapiaconference.org/2009/) and I was wanting to solicit some input from the readers of ScienceWomen. The title of the BoF is "Developing, Recruiting, and Retaining Underrepresented Groups in the National…

Retraction of support for quick drug information source

A couple of days ago I recommended a short information table that compared conventional small molecule drugs to biologics (antibody therapies and other peptides/proteins). It was quick and I recommended it for the average Terra Sig reader. However, I was quick in writing the post, and should have been more critical of the information I was recommending. Quick and concise means nothing if the information isn't accurate. To be honest, I haven't gone back to look at the table since - that is, until my colleague Ian Musgrave (I hope he's not ashamed that I called him "my colleague") pointed…

Marine Chemical Ecology: Therapeutic Natural Products from the Sea

In a post the other day, we noted that the semi-synthetic natural product, ixabepilone, approved for advanced breast cancer was derived from a soil bacterium. Colleague PharmCanuck reminded us that the soil is not a new source for drugs: the anthracyclines, daunorubicin and doxorubicin, are derived from a strain of Streptomyces found growing on a 13th century castle along the Adriatic Sea (hence the brand name for doxorubicin, Adriamycin). Amazingly, Adriamycin remains a foundation of many breast cancer chemo regimens more than 30 years after its approval. While we speak here quite often…