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Coyne in Maryland

Having communicated for so long by blog and e-mail, it was a pleasure to finally meet Jerry Coyne in person last night. He was speaking at the University of Maryland. It was not the easiest trip in the world. Driving was out of the question since it would have involved braving the Beltway near rush hour. With all due respect to Jerry, there ain't no one worth that kind of trouble. But UM has its own Metro stop. So I drove to the Vienna station, took a long train ride that involved three of DC's five Metro lines, then a bus over to the campus, and then the following conversation: ME (to…

Does Theology Progress?

Karl Giberson has a new column up at the Huffington Post. Jerry Coyne and I had an interesting exchange yesterday that will appear in a brief video on USA Today's website at some point. The question related to the compatibility of science and religion. Can one accept the modern scientific view of the world and still hold to anything resembling a traditional belief in God? My answer to this question is “yes, of course,” for I cannot see my way to clear to embrace either of the two alternatives -- a fundamentalist religion prepared to reject science, or a pure scientism that denies the reality…

Travel Should Always Be Like This

The trip to California went well. Suspiciously well, in fact, to the point where, even though I am now back home, I am still waiting for something to go wrong. I first became suspicious during the two-hour drive over to Dulles Airport. There was no traffic. How odd. My rule of thumb when flying out of Dulles is to leave home five hours before flight time. That almost never happens, however, and usually it is closer to three and a half hours, which is really cutting it close. Heavy traffic only seems to occur when you are already in danger of missing your flight. Some corollary to…

Bunting on Atheism

The article by Julian Baggini disucssed in yesterday's blog post was a reply of sorts to this article by Madeleine Bunting. She starts with some encouraging words: This is Holy Week. It started yesterday with Palm Sunday and continues through Holy Thursday, Good Friday and culminates this Sunday with Easter Day. One can no longer assume most people will be aware of this, let alone the events these days mark; in a recent UK poll, only 22% could identify what Easter was celebrating. What other system of belief has collapsed at such spectacular speed as British Christianity? One can only…

Scientific Thinking, Stereotypes, and Attitudes

A few more comments on the scientific thinking thing, because it's generated a bunch of comments. As usual, some of them are good points, and some of them have completely misunderstood what I was trying to say. so let's take another crack at it. While the post was worded somewhat strongly, I'm not really trying to stake out a position diametrically opposed to what Neil DeGrasse Tyson said. In fact, I suspect we agree more than we disagee. We certainly share the same broad goal, namely to see more people thinking more scientifically more often. The difference is really a question of emphasis.…

A tale of two day-long meetings

Purdue is now on summer time, which means it is a time for day-long retreats, meetings, and types of work. I've experienced two flavors of day-long meetings, and have one or two insights to share with you about each. My first meeting was one scheduled months in advance, with various academic heads of state (ok, not really) and leaders from across campus. The day was organized to get some specific kinds of work done, and I had high hopes; however, as it turned out, half the attendees had not read their email, and therefore had only done half of the preparation for the first activity (a…

The Friday Fermentable: 2002 Red & White Burgundies, by Erleichda

[Back by popular demand is my Friday Fermentable co-blogger, Erleichda - to read all of the offerings from my silver-tongued and golden-palated friend, see this compilation. For new readers, here is The Friday Fermentable mission statement.] Another Wine Experience : 2002 White & Red Burgundies By Erleichda It was Mort's fault. As alluded to obliquely a few columns ago, it was he who introduced me to "fine wines.". So many years ago, the story has improved with each telling, I was invited to participate in my first trout fishing adventure. After hours of practice casting, I was ready…

Your Loss is Your Gain

Evolution isn't simply about the genes you gain. It's also about the genes you lose. The word loss has a painful, grieving sound to human ears, and so it can be hard to see how it can have anything to do with the rise of diversity and complexity in life. And until recently, evolutionary biologists didn't pay much attention to lost genes because they were preoccupied with the emergence of new ones. New genes, they found, can be produced in many ways. A gene can get accidentally duplicated, for example, and the copy can mutate, taking on a new function. Or pieces of two separate genes can get…

Pew Survey of Scientists & the Public: Implications for Public Engagement and Communication

[UPDATE: See this follow up on media reaction to the report.] The Pew Research Center released today a major new survey report documenting Americans' views of science and technology and comparing these lay perceptions to a representative sample of U.S. scientists who are members of AAAS. As part of a panel of experts, I had the chance to contribute input and ideas on the survey earlier this year. I have been eagerly looking forward to the findings ever since. Below I have jotted down a few key implications that come to mind on my first scan. I will have more to say next week and probably…

Two-photon mouse air hockey

Every so often, I encounter a technical advance that is simply so crazy-cool that I have to talk about it. Dombeck et al. publishing in Neuron offer such an advance. They found a way to image the activity of whole fields of neurons using two-photon fluorescent microscopy -- a technique that I will define in a second. They can do this with in mice that are actually behaving by mounting the mouse in an apparatus that lets the mouse run on a track ball floating on air -- just like air hockey. (I want to meet the person who came up with that. There had to be high-fives all-around.)…

On Climate, John Dingell's Framing of the Public

The Sunday Washington Post leads with a story that greenhouse gas mitigation proposals in Congress are likely to stall, in part because several key lawmakers believe (or at least claim) that the public will not support the economic impacts associated with the proposals. Michigan Democrat John Dingell is the leading skeptic when it comes to public support and his selective framing of where the public stands on the matter is in line with his close auto industry ties. As the Post reports: "I sincerely doubt that the American people are willing to pay what this is really going to cost them,"…

The Disco Institute has a press conference on Gonzalez's behalf

Yesterday the Discovery Institute held a press conference at the capitol building in Des Moines, to announce Guillermo Gonzalez's plans to sue Iowa State University over their decision to deny him tenure. Supposedly the lawsuit will be filed pending the rejection of an appeal to the Board of Regents, which is virtually guaranteed simply for the fact that the Regents typically uphold tenure decisions. Joining Casey Luskin, Rob Crowther, Gonzalez's attorneys, and a few other DI folk was state Senator David Hartsuch (R-District 41). The core of the DI's assertion is that there were "secret…

Greater Performance Improvements When Quick Responses Are Rewarded More Than Accuracy Itself.

Last month's Frontiers in Psychology contains a fascinating study by Dambacher, HuÌbner, and Schlösser in which the authors demonstrate that the promise of financial reward can actually reduce performance when rewards are given for high accuracy. Counterintuitively, performance (characterized as accuracy per unit time) is actually better increased by financial rewards for response speed in particular. The authors demonstrated this surprising result using a flanker task. In Dambacher et al's "parity" version of the flanker, subjects had to determine whether the middle character in strings…

Why I Am Not A Humanist*

           Looking nonhumans in the eye.      Image: Elephant Man by Chris GallucciIn 1927 Bertrand Russell wrote his now famous essay "Why I Am Not A Christian" and outlined the general reasons for why he rejected such an ideology. This approach has been followed by other writers such as Ibn Warraq in Why I Am Not A Muslim, Ramendra Nath in his essay "Why I Am Not A Hindu" and David Dvorkin in his "Why I Am Not A Jew." My own choice of title is not in the same tradition as these other writers (since I agree with much of what humanism has to offer), but I do share with them a concern over…

How questioning PTSD rates makes me an apologist for imperialist violence

It didn't take long for my Scientific American story on PTSD to draw the sort of fire I expected. A doctor blogging as "egalwan" at Follow Me Here writes [Dobbs] is critical of a culture which "seemed reflexively to view bad memories, nightmares and any other sign of distress as an indicator of PTSD." To critics like this, the overwhelming incidence of PTSD diagnoses in returning Iraqi veterans is not a reflection of the brutal meaningless horror to which many of the combatants were exposed but of a sissy culture that can no longer suck it up. Doctor or not, he's seeing politics where my…

Is Bigger Really Better?

I have to confess, when I saw a global map of average penis size flying around twitter, I was like a eighth grade boy finding his first nudie magazine - I couldn't help but take a peek. After a brief heart attack (it's in cm, not inches), my inner scientist started asking silly questions. You know, the kind of things that would only occur to a scientist when looking at a map of penis size like, "is this just a stochastic distribution?" "is there any reason why this pattern would occur?" and of course, "does penis size even matter from an evolutionary perspective?!" Turns out that inner…

What's Good For Women Graduate Students?

This is the second of three discussion posts for Week 2 of Feminist Theory and the Joy of Science. You can find all posts for this course by going to the archives and clicking on Joy of Science under in the Category section. This post deals with the reading by Fox. What do women need to succeed in science? Does what they need differ from what men need? If so, why? What constitutes a good environment for women in science? What constitutes success? Will having more women in science affect the way that science is done? The reading by Fox addresses most of these questions for the case…

The limits of tolerance

Casey Luskin, over at the Discovery Institute's Media Complaints blog doesn't like the reaction that an Idaho crowd had to a PZ Myers quote. He believes that both Myers and the crowd were being intolerant. Here's the PZ quote at the center of the issue. Actually, as Paul points out in his own response to Casey, the "quote" is actually two separate quotes taken from two totally separate posts, and stuck together with a totally inappropriate ellipsis. (When two statements appear on two separate websites two months apart, you really aren't supposed to link them with three little dots and…

What makes natural selection a process powerful enough to bring about the evolution of adaptations?

This is a guest post by Carl Bajema, a retired evolutionary biologist, first posted on the Richard Dawkins website on Darwin's birthday. Happy 198th Birthday Charlie Darwin from Carl Bajema... Organisms with their intricate adaptations for surviving and reproducing could not have evolved by chance alone. Both creationists and evolutionary biologists agree with this conclusion. Charles Darwin understood that the designs we observe in nature could not have been produced by undirected random processes alone. Selection was widely understood before Darwin's time to be strictly a negative…

Instruction and information

Many words in English come directly via Latin or indirectly via French from Latin, and they have a meaning in English that is sometimes quite different from their etymology, occasionally leaching back into French. Two such words are instruction and information, and both have peculiar meanings when used in the context of genetics. Instruction is particularly interesting. The OED tells us that it has the following etymology: [f. L. instruct-, ppl. stem of instruÄre to build, erect, set up, set in order, prepare, furnish, furnish with information, teach, f. in- (IN-2) + struÄre to pile up…

Dawkins' "wholly false view" of evolution

A little more than halfway through the horror novel The Relic, a blood-spattered tale of a monster lurking in the bowels of the American Museum of Natural History, the scientist Greg Kawakita shows off his evolutionary extrapolation program to his colleague, Margo. It is a complex analysis system designed to take two DNA samples and spit out a hypothetical intermediate creature, essentially extrapolating what their common ancestor must have been like. In a test run, Greg has the computer scrutinize the DNA of a chimpanzee and a human; Intermediate form morphological characteristics: Gracile…

Book Review: The Paleobiological Revolution

On the 31st of May, 1984, the late evolutionary theorist John Maynard Smith appraised the field of paleontology in the journal Nature. The report was a critical summary of a series of lectures Stephen Jay Gould had given at Cambridge, and Gould considered it "the kindest and most supportive critical commentary I have ever received." Smith wrote; The attitude of population geneticists to any palaeontologist rash enough to offer a contribution to evolutionary theory has been to tell him to go away and find another fossil, and not to bother the grownups. In the last ten years, however, this…

Most Offensive Op-Ed Ever

Usually the LA Times does not print things this awful.  Usually these things don't bother me so much.  The problem is not just that the author is wrong, or that he develops his argument poorly -- although both are true.  What bothers me is the pointlessly malicious tone of the piece. href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-bawer2sep02,0,833953.story?coll=la-home-commentary">The peace racket A growing movement is pushing a worldview that ignores history's lessons about strength and appeasement. By Bruce Bawer September 2, 2007 'If you want peace, prepare for…

Book Review: Visual Language for Designers (and Scientists)

Modeling the flight of a bat (click to enlarge) Dave Willis et. al., Brown University and MIT Visual complexity is a paradox. On the one hand, complexity is a compelling feature known to capture a viewer's attention and stimulate interest. . . . On the other hand, complexity only arouses curiosity up to a point. When a visual is extremely complex, viewers may tend to avoid it altogether. -- Connie Malamed I had a great time this weekend devouring Connie Malamed's oversized treasury of data visualization, Visual Language for Designers. The book couldn't be more appealing: it's like someone…

Rocket Xanax: Fail!

Sometimes  I see news about upcoming drugs, and hope that it works out.  Sometimes, I don't see the point.  Rarely, I actively hope that it does not work out.  Staccato® alprazolam is one that I hope does not work out.   It's a form of href="http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/medmaster/a684001.html">alprazolam (Xanax®) that goes in an inhaler.  It is heated by a little electrical circuit, vaporized, then inhaled.  The idea it to give it a faster onset of action. Why? First, a little background.  Alprazolam is a member of the href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

William Lane Craig and the problem of pain

Kitties experience pain and suffering, which turns out to be a theological problem. If a god introduced pain and death into the world because wicked ol' Eve was disobedient, why is god punishing innocent animals? It seems like a bit of a rotten move to afflict the obedient along with the disobedient — shouldn't god have just stricken humanity with the wages of sin (or better yet, just womankind)? William Lane Craig has an answer. His answer involves simply waving the problem away — animals don't really feel pain — and he drags in science to prop up his claim. Basically, Craig is playing the…

Hierarchy, meritocracy, the blogosphere, and the real world.

Those who follow the political blogs more closely than I do were probably aware eons ago that some of the A-list political bloggers significantly trimmed their blogrolls (while dubbing it, strangely enough, a blogroll "amnesty"). Others, like Terrance at the Republic of T (who is as close to the Platonic form of Serious and Engaging Blogger as any blogger of whom I'm aware), took note of this just recently, with a thoughtful post about the interactions of the various "tiers" of the blogosphere and the ways hierarchies get entrenched. Chris Clarke and Pam Spaulding also wrote insightfully…

Scientific and unscientific conclusions: now with pictures!

This is another attempt to get to the bottom of what's bugging people about the case of Marcus Ross, Ph.D. in geosciences and Young Earth Creationist. Here, I've tried to distill the main hypotheticals from my last post on the issue into flowcharts*, in the hopes that this will make it easier for folks to figure out just what they want to say about the proper way to build scientific knowledge.. First, here's the process that no one thinks is a good description of how to come to a scientific conclusion: Believing something doesn't make it so. Science is an endeavor that is not concerned…

Has the demarcation problem been solved?

Revere stirs the pot (of chicken soup) to ask why alternative therapies are presumptively regarded as pseudo-science. The reflexive response of the quackbusters has been that alternative therapies fall on the wrong side of some bright line that divides what is scientific from what is not -- the line of demarcation that (scientists seem to assume) Karl Popper pointed out years ago, and that keeps the borders of science secure. While I think a fair amount of non-science is so far from the presumptive border that we are well within our rights to just point at it and laugh, as a philosopher of…

Ask Dr. Free-Ride: How should I address multiple doctors?

I have, of late, received a number of emails asking advice on matters somewhere in the territory between ethics, etiquette, and effective communication with members of the tribe of science. While I'm no Ann Landers (as has been noted before), I'll do my best to answer these questions on the blog when I can, largely so my very insightful commentariat can chime in and make the resulting advice better than what I could generate on my own. Today we have a question from a reader struggling with the question of how to address one letter to two doctors. He writes: Hi Dr Free-Ride, I'm not sure if…

Basic concepts: Truth.

No, I'm not going to be able to get away with claiming that truth is beauty, and beauty, truth. The first issue in understanding truth is recognizing that truth is a property of a proposition. (What's a proposition? A proposition is a claim.) A proposition that is true has a certain kind of correspondence with the world about which it is making a claim. A proposition that is false does not have this correspondence. At the most basic level, what we want from this correspondence seems pretty obvious: what the propositions says about the world matches up with how the world actually is. So,…

A Scottish doctor endorses Robert O. Young's "pH Miracle Living"

I didn’t think I’d be revisiting this topic so quickly. However, given that I’m at TAM and I don’t have a lot of time to do one of my usual 2,000 word epics for a change, I thought that this story, which popped up the other day while I was traveling was at least worth mentioning: Robert Young will appear in a California court today on 18 charges of theft and "treating the sick without a certificate" at his alternative retreat near San Diego. Among other offences, the 63-year-old, who believes in the "pH Miracle" of avocado juice, is accused of taking more than $50,000 from a man dying of…

Thanks again, antivaccine loons

I'm a bit torn today. On the one hand, it makes me cringe when pundits write inflammatory articles blaming Jenny McCarthy for measles outbreaks. Yes, I know that I once did the same thing myself, but, as much as antivaccinationists dislike me, I've actually toned it down a bit when it comes to that particular line of attack, having learned that it is important not to overstate the pro-science case or risk making errors of fact that antivaccinationists can jump all over in order to try to discredit arguments against them. On the other hand, it can't be denied that declining vaccination rates…

Earn CME credits for attending an autism quackfest!

Well, it snuck up on me again, the way it has a tendency to do every year. Maybe it's because Memorial Day is so early this year. Maybe it's because there's just so much work to do this week given the multiple grant deadlines. Whatever the case, it just dawned on my last night that today is the first day of the yearly autism quackfest known as AutismOne (AO), which is being held at the Intercontinental O'Hare Hotel near Chicago. Of course, things are different this year. Given the schism between team Crosby and pretty much everyone else in the antivaccine movement, it's unclear what the deal…

The promotion of an antivaccine propaganda movie continues apace

I'll give the Canary Party credit for one thing, if credit you can consider it. It's persistent in its promotion of antivaccine pseudoscience. Somehow, someone at Current TV decided that it would be a good idea to show an utterly unbalanced, utterly cranky, utterly propagandistic "documentary" (The Greater Good) that seeks to demonize vaccines as the cause of autism, neurodevelopmental disorders, autoimmune disease, and, apparently tooth decay, too. (I'm joking about the last one--but just barely.) I wrote about its misinformation, cherry picking, and relying on anecdotes rather than science…

"Tell both sides" strikes again in vaccine reporting

Over the years that I've been following the anti-vaccine movement, I've become familiar with typical narratives that reporters use when reporting on the vaccine fears stirred up by anti-vaccine activists. One narrative is the "brave maverick doctor" narrative, in which an iconoclastic quack (such as Mark Geier or Andrew Wakefield, for example) is portrayed fighting a lonely battle against the scientific orthodoxy. This particular narrative is extremely popular because it feeds into the story of the "underdog," coupled with a healthy disrespect of the powers that be, particularly the…

Expelled!, anti-vaccine style, 2011 edition (continued)

Today's a holiday here in the U.S. You'd think that I'd be taking it easy, but, sadly, thanks to the insatiable needs of the NIH grant monster, today, as I was doing most of the day Saturday and part of the day yesterday, will be working on grants; that is, when I don't take a couple of hours to get that jungle of a lawn that surrounds my house mowed. (Thanks to the almost daily downpours producing the wettest spring I can remember, "jungle" is a fairly accurate term to describe our yard at the moment.) Despite all this, I would still be remiss if I didn't take a little time to followup on my…

J.B. Handley surprises...partially

I'm pretty hard on anti-vaccine activists. I know that. One in particular provokes my ire because of his particular brand of loutishness, intimidation, and stupidity. I'm talking about, of course, J.B. Handley, founder of Generation Rescue and blogger at its propaganda arm Age of Autism. As much as JB and I detest each other though, on rare occasions (of which this appears to be the first) I'm forced to admit that JB actually did something right. Five months ago, JB wrote a hilarious bit of detection work in which he concluded that a blogger by the 'nym of Sullivan was, in reality, Dr. Paul…

The vaccination does make the baby cry, so why do it?

It seems like every time I take Huxley (now 18 months old) to the doctor, the following things happen: 1) Somebody says "Well, he won't need to get stuck with any needles for a long while now .... his next scheduled immunization is [insert phrase indicating 'a long time into the future']"; and 2) Huxley gets stuck with some needles. The last time, a few days ago, was especially bad. We hung around in the exam room for a while, and Huxley was in a very happy mood. He learned to say "Elmo" and how to point to the "Otoscope" when asked. The doctor, having recently had a baby of her own,…

CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta: Falling for faith healing quackery

Christmas is over. Heck even Boxing Day is over. Still, Orac is doing something very unusual for him in that he's taking a bit of a staycation at home. Consider it a sanity break. Even though I'll be working on grants and a variety of other projects at home and even though I haven't signed out my pager to one of my partners, it is still a very good thing indeed not to see the inside of my office for ten days. As for blogging, understandably, given that readership has fallen off markedly the week between Christmas and New Years each and every year since I started blogging way back in 2004, I…

I really admire skeptical English bloggers and commentators...

...because they blog under the shadow of the United Kingdom's insane libel laws. Witness this travesty of a ruling on the libel case against Simon Singh by the British Chiropractic Association, as related by Jack of Kent. I first learned about the UK's exceedingly plaintiff-friendly libel laws when, shortly after I became interested in Holocaust denial, I followed the libel case against Holocaust historian Professor Deborah Lipstadt brought by Holocaust denier David Irving for, well, quite properly calling him a Holocaust denier in one of her books. What makes British libel laws so plaintiff-…

Requiem for a quack, part II: Hulda Clark, author of The Cure for All Cancers, died of cancer

About a month and half ago, we learned that über-quack Hulda Clark, the woman who said that she had the Cure for All Cancers, had died on September 3, 2009. I was criticized for entitling my post Requiem for a Quack, but, given how Clark's quackery had contributed to the suffering and deaths of an unknown number of cancer patients, I didn't really feel too bad about it, although I do realize that the taboo about speaking ill of the recently dead is a strong one. At the time, I was curious what the cause of Dr. Clark's death was, because it seemed rather mysterious, being described as the…

My last entry for a long time on the Maher issue (I hope), plus a little history

I hadn't planned on writing much, if anything more, about the whole Bill Maher debacle, but PZ has shown up in my comments and graciously tried to explain what's going on at the AAI convention regarding the truly awful choice of Bill Maher for the Richard Dawkins Award: Look, I don't know what else I can say. I didn't endorse Maher; if they'd run this decision by me months ago, I would have said, "Are you nuts?". But of course, I have no clout with the AAI. Dawkins consented to the award initially, because he didn't know much about the full views held by the crackpot; he would certainly have…

Reclaiming the linguistic high ground: Renaming "complementary and alternative" medicine and the power of language

A few days ago, I was amused by a term coined by Dr. R.W. The term, "quackademic medicine," was meant to describe the unholy fusion of non-science- and non-evidence-based woo that has infiltrated academic medicine to a disturbing extent over the last decade or two. There was a lot of reaction, mainly positive, to the new term, and I even got an e-mail from a certain skeptical podcaster vowing to use the term every opportunity that he got. One reader, Jim Benton, made a comment that got me to thinking. Here's the comment: My 'crusade of the year' this year (other than getting a Democratic…

A little pessimism about Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Warren sent me link from The Indigestible, wondering if I was interested in these kinds of speculative questions about the existence of alien life. Why, yes I am...and even wrote something along the same lines a few years ago, coming to the same conclusions: I think intelligent extraterrestrials are unlikely. My reasons are below the fold. Of course, I will retract my opinion immediately when Klaatu lands. DarkSyd asks a question: The Fermi Paradox is a conundrum proposed by pioneer physicist Enrico Fermi that questions the likelihood of Intelligent Extraterrestrial life. It begins with the…

Deepak Chopra does it again

Deepak Chopra really is an embarrassment. I've tussled with his weird arguments before, and now he's flounced onto the Huffington Post with another article (prompted by an article on human genetics in Time, but bearing almost no relationship to it) in which he reveals his profound ignorance of biology, in something titled The Trouble With Genes. Chopra is a doctor, supposedly, but every time I read something by him that touches on biology, he sounds as ignorant as your average creationist. He also writes incredibly poorly, bumbling his way forward with a succession of unlikely and…

Heck yeah—Caroline Crocker should have been fired

…but she wasn't. She was allowed to continue her educational malpractice until her contract expired, and then was not rehired—something that happens to adjunct and assistant professors all the time, with no necessary implication of poor work. Caroline Crocker, if you've never heard of her, is the lead topic in an article in the Washington Post today, and you may also have read an account of her situation in Nature. She's a molecular biologist who believes in Intelligent Design, and who was released from her position at George Mason University. Now she wants to claim that her academic freedom…

Scientists are People Too: Belief Options for a Practicing Scientist

I'm realizing that perhaps in yesterday's post I took everyone's love and understanding of postmodern feminist theory for granted so I'm going to start a little series of posts that I think will slowly introduce some of the issues that I spend a lot of time thinking about and hope that other people will too. Today I'm going to jump right into it by posting the essay I wrote for a horrible class I took about science and religion called Belief Options for a Practicing Scientist. The assignment was to write a five page essay on what the best belief option for a scientist is and why. I think that…

Why Swine Flu Is Resistant to Adamantane Drugs

On Wednesday, the CDC reported that influenza A H1N1 viruses from 13 patients with confirmed diagnoses of swine flu had been tested for resistance to a variety of antiviral drugs. The good news was that all of the isolates were susceptible to the antiviral drugs oseltamivir (Tamiflu) and zanamivir (Relenza). However, all 13 were resistant to adamantane-based drugs (amantadine and rimantadine). Resistance to adamantane drugs (which were developed first) has actually become quite widespread among flu viruses in general, so oseltamivir and zanamivir are commonly the drugs of choice. The…

Feedback on "Advancing Science Through Conversations"

Since our paper on the role of blogs in academia was published earlier this week, we've received quite a bit of feedback from the across blogosphere. Befittingly, the authors of the paper have contributed to this, as Tara gave her thoughts on her blog, I gave mine on my blog (Shelley has been busy traveling for interviews, so she hasn't had a chance to weigh in yet), and we published a list of acknowledgments. (I'd also like to thank our respective universities' press offices for their outreach efforts. I found Oxford particularly pleasant to work with, and they even put up something on…