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Best Science Books 2010: Vancouver Sun, Largehearted Boy, Slate, Boston Globe

Another bunch of lists for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure. Vancouver Sun Drowning in Oil: BP & the Reckless Pursuit of Profit by Loren Steffy How the Scots Invented the Modern World The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It by Arthur Herman The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee Largehearted Boy The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Slate The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Boston Globe The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by…

Best Science Books 2010: Salon.com

Another bunch of shorter lists for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure. Salon.com The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Concurring Opinions (Privacy books) The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors by Hal Niedzviecki The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger New York Magazine The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (The Skloot book probably deserves a special award for so often being the only science book on a list…

Best Science Books 2010: Financial Times

Another nice list. The Facebook Effect: The Insider Story of the Company that is Connecting the World by David Kirkpatrick MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain by Antonio Damasio The Eerie Silence: Are We Alone in the Universe? by Paul Davies Through the Language Glass: How Words Colour Your World by Guy Deutscher The Mind's Eye by Oliver Sacks Honeybee Democracy by Thomas D Seeley The Immortal Life of Henrietta…

Best Science Books 2010: Publisher's Weekly

Another list for your reading and collection development perusal, this time from Publisher's Weekly: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot About a Mountain by John D'Agata The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed by Judy Pasternak Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margins of Error by Kathryn Schulz The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu Origins: How the Nine Months Before…

Seed's Daily Zeitgeist: 9/22/2006

Lawyers call for science to clear AIDS nurses in Libya Declan Butler reports on the Tripoli Six, medical workers sentenced to die by firing squad for supposedly infecting over 400 children with HIV. The evidence points to their innocence, and their lawyers are calling for the science community to rally to their cause. The bloggers are doing just that. Margaret Thatcher Illusion A hideous display of face perception. Read the original paper here. (via boing boing) Physics of Superheroes 1 - Death of Gwen Stacy Not even Spiderman's web could provide a slow enough change in momentum. Astrology…

Quick Picks on ScienceBlogs, August 7

Wake up and smell the content: a good week's reading starts here. "Hurricane-Climate Books" Two new titles look ahead to the one-year anniversary of Katrina's wrath. "20,000 Year Old Australian Footprints" The Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area in New South Wales, Australia, turns up traces of ancient humans on the move. "Algal Bloom in the Charles River?" Mike the Mad Biologist thinks he's observed an algal bloom in Boston's Charles River. Have any other Bostonians out there noticed this? "The Synapse vol 1, issue 4" Started on ScienceBlogs but drawing entries from throughout the…

ScienceBlogs is no more: Confessions of a Science Librarian is moving

As of November 1st, 2017, ScienceBlogs is shutting down, necessitating relocation of this blog. It's been over eight years and 1279 posts. It's been predatory open access publishers, April Fool's posts and multiple wars on science. A long and wonderful trip, career-transforming, network building and an awful lot of fun. Over that period of time, ScienceBlogs has gone from the 800 pound gorilla of science blogging to just another site with not enough traffic to keep the lights on, which I guess is the way of the world. Things change, life moves on. Thanks to everyone at ScienceBlogs for all…

Around the Web: The 100 greatest music books of all time, Does the music business need musicianship and more tales of the music business

100 Greatest Music Books of All Time Does the music business need musicianship not to speak ill of the dead.. but.. on the demise of other music What It Takes for an Independent Record Store to Survive Now Why record stores mattered How Miles Davis remade jazz over and over again The Electric Surge of Miles Davis The Classic Cool of Miles Davis Brilliant Corners: Approaches to Jazz and Comics How New York City Became the Epicenter of Jazz new york’s free jazz loft scene, with tom marcello’s photos from studio rivbea How Canada's Philanthropic Pop Industrial Complex Took Over The World Don't…

The Eleventh Commandment is “Thou shalt mess with this poll”

Let us stir up a little tempest in Tennessee. An internet poll asks, SHOULD A DISPLAY OF THE 10 COMMANDMENTS BE ALLOWED IN OUR COUNTY COURTHOUSE?. The currently leading answer, with 82% of the vote, is "Absolutely. The laws of our land are based on the 10 Commandments and anybody who doesn't want to look at them (or read them) certainly doesn't have to do so." This poll also has something sneaky. There are 5 possible answers, but they've just worded the same thing differently to split our votes. The intelligent options are "Such a display is inappropriate in any public building," "No way.…

Around the Web: Taking a longer view of librarianship

Taking a Longer View Why librarianship is difficult and contentious Schism in the Stacks: Is the University Library As We Know It Destined for Extinction? The Future of Libraries: Harvard Students Are Thinking Outside the Box Why piles of bad applications may not portend disaster Silencing, librarianship, and gender: sticking up for stories Making Space for the Silenced A New Year’s Vision of the Future of Libraries as Ebookstores How Users Search the Library from a Single Search Box 5 Futures for Libraries How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood Who needs facts? We appear to be in the…

Dare to Dream: Dr. Bernard Tells His Journey From Physician, NASA Astronaut to Successful Entrepreneur at the X-STEM Symposium

One only has to look at the impressive life and career of Dr. Bernard Harris to realize that he is indeed what he often describes himself as: "a dreamer who believes nothing is impossible." Trained as a physician, Bernard combined his talents and initiative to also serve as a scientist and astronaut at NASA (including becoming the first Black American to walk in space) and to later push the limits as a successful entrepreneur in the realm of space innovation, healthcare and science education. Watch the X-STEM Presentation below from Dr. Harris:  Read more about Dr. Harris here. On April 24,…

Celebrating Role Models in Science & Engineering Achievement: Kristin Laidre

Kristin Laidre --Marine Mammal Biologist Kristin Laidre is one of the world's foremost experts on the elusive, mysterious Narwhal whale. Her work with native communities in Arctic regions of Canada and Greenland is helping to preserve the Narwhal and other sea mammals from the effects sea ice loss due to climate change. "I was always interested in marine biology, marine animals, and even science as a junior-high and high school student," she recalls. "In upstate New York I rarely got to visit the ocean, but when I did (usually on Long Island), I loved it and knew if I could create the…

Modern Fear, Modern Security

What moves human beings to innovate measures of security? History will tell us that the most inventive and industrious times are fraught with warfare, uncertainty, and widespread fear. Greg Laden, a longtime ScienceBlogger, helps tackle this topic this month on the new Collective Imagination blog with Peter Tu, a systems design engineer who has developed algorithms for the FBI Automatic Fingerprint Identification System, and is the principle investigator for the ReFace Program at the Visualization and Computer Vision Group at the GE Global Research Center. Greg and Peter discuss the important…

The Buzz: Eruptive Media

This week, Eruptions' Erik Klemetti sparked interest in the recent rumblings heard coming from Mt. Rainier in Washington State when he responded to a reader's comment on increased seismic activity in the area over the past month. Klemetti's response post, which reported on concrete facts surrounding the geologic events and featured a detailed graph of Mt. Rainier's seismic activity over the past year, yielded a slew of comments and stirred fellow blogger, Greg Laden, to post a related story, which also garnered lively commentary. Ironically, Klemetti's following post detailed this viral…

The Buzz: No Distributor for Darwin in US

Most Americans are familiar with Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, but less well known is his personal struggle with the conflicting ideologies of science and religion. A new film from producer Jeremy Thomas, Creation, aims to tell the story of Darwin's life through the cinematic lens—but Americans who would pay the box office price to watch it unfold won't be able to. US distributors have opted not to pick up the film, which the Telegraph reports has gotten outstanding early reviews, due to concerns that its message won't sit well with religious groups. Ethan Siegel of…

Spotlight on Paleontology

Dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures are one of the first things that capture kids' interest in science, but the fascination doesn't end with childhood. Paleontology takes the spotlight on ScienceBlogs this week, where bloggers are highlighting its presence in the media and current events, the arts, and education. On Laelaps, Brian Switek responds to a pro-creationist article in the Telegraph with his post on the Aetiocetus, an ancient ancestor of the whale. Not Exactly Rocket Science's Ed Yong takes us back to the 1990s when Jurassic Park's "computer-generated reptilian actors" were…

Let's switch to radio

Things are getting ugly at scienceblogs right now — you've probably noticed all the errors in making comments, and those of us on the inside are struggling even more to get through to put up posts. Rumor has it that we may be undergoing some kind of denial-of-service attack — we're short of information ourselves, since our tech people are too busy tearing their hair out and pounding on recalcitrant iron to give us updates. We'll know more when everything is fixed. Soon, I hope. Until then, have patience and try not to post too many duplicate comments. We may have to switch to old media. I'll…

The Buzz: Science in the European Parliament

In January, Barack Obama promised in his inaugural address to "restore science to its rightful place." The pledge was a win for scientists everywhere, and particularly for those working in the US. But now, with the European Parliamentary (EP) elections at hand, whether Obama's sentiments are shared by politicians worldwide remains to be seen. Last Thursday through Sunday, members of the 27 member states of the European Union voted for representatives from seven parties to fill 736 seats in the EP. ScienceBlogger Frank Swain of SciencePunk, together with The Lay Scientist, sent a nine-…

Are You in a Book Club?

About six months ago, I started a book club with a bunch of my girl friends. So far, we've only read three books. But despite the infrequency of our meetings, the club has been both fun and intellectually fulfilling. Anyway, the whole experience got me thinking about the popularity of book clubs. The Association of Book Group Readers and Leaders (AGBRL), a "cooperative information clearinghouse to provoke, inspire, and reward individual readers and members of book discussion groups," boasts over 500 members in 40 states and six foreign countries. And that's only counting clubs that bother to…

DonorsChoose Stats!

Yesterday was the last day to take part in the DonorsChoose challenge. Now the final tallies are ready, and we are super, super proud: ScienceBlogs readers donated $54,335 for 155 classroom projects. With $15,000 in matching funds from Seed Media group, that means our readers put $69,335 toward U.S. science literacy. WooT! Janet Stemwedel, ScienceBlogs ringleader of the drive, said that she's "awestruck" at this year's numbers: I knew already that ScienceBlogs bloggers and readers were strongly committed to the idea that improving math and science literacy would be a good thing, but it's…

"And On His Farm He Had a Fuel Cell, E-i-ei-o..."

In the wake of the IPCC report, you may have missed out on this proposal, which bears integrally on our economy, our environment and our health. The 2002 Farm Bill is up for renewal. On Wednesday, Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns introduced a new Farm Bill that, while not as revolutionary as some had hoped, takes steps to mitigate some of the uglier faces of large-scale agribusiness. The new bill eliminates subsidies for farmers who earn more than $200 thousand per year (down from $2.5 million), and aims to democratize the current subsidy system which tends to over-compensate…

Mind the GDP, I Mean, the Gap

Over at Retrospectacle, there was some discussion about whether the richest countries were the most polluting countries. This little tool from Google has an answer, and so much more. The US is represented by the large yellow circle in the (predictably) upper-right corner. Most European countries are in the upper right corner, too, although the logarithmic scale is a little misleading: for the most part, European countries emit about half as much CO2 per capita as the US. In fact, the Middle Eastern oil trifecta--Kuwait, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates--is the only region that…

This test is much easier than the one my students will get on Thursday

Imagine that you are running for the State Board of Education, and you receive a questionnaire from a science organization trying to get a feel for your positions on issues important to them. Here's the first question: 1. As a State Board of Education member, which of the following organizations would you trust to inform your decision-making in regards to science? Check all that apply. American Association for the Advancement of Science _____ The Intelligent Design Network ____ The National Academies of Science _____ The Discovery Institute ____ The American Institute of…

Vote and help us decide on a Festival jingle!

Songs and jingles about the USA Science & Engineering Festival? You bet! And so many good ones, that we can't make up our minds! Have you voted yet? We need your help to chose our final jingle as well as get the word out. Send this to your friends and get them to help us decide who to pick!! Just under a week to vote! So listen to the submissions and get your vote in! Find the 7 jingles here listen to them all and then vote! You have until MAY 12th to vote! Some of the submissions don't include the words "USA Science & Engineering Festival" - we have still included them here because…

Following flu with Health Map

Last night, the phone rang at 9:22 pm. I quickly glanced at the caller ID. Hmmm. Why is the Seattle School district calling us at this time of night? Apparently the swine flu has come to Seattle and the school district thought we should know. Those messages are helpful if you're a parent, but they don't tell much about the rest of the world. Health Map is a really wonderful, user-friendly, resource for following the epidemic. When you get to Health Map , choose Select None to clear the map. Then select Swine Flu. You'll see a Google map with markers representing reports. The colors show…

What is the direction of the rainbow?

and what is the volume of the sea? This sounds a bit like the beginning of a poem but it's really the answer to the question we posed last week on a Digital Biology Friday. We can see, in the sequence window, that two strands are both labeled 5' on the left side and 3' on the right. We call this direction "five prime to three prime." But, when we look in the structure window, we see that the two strands are oriented in the opposite direction relative to each other. The 5' end of one strand is located across from the 3' end of the other strand. (Note: I added the arrow and labels, this…

Too funny to ignore

Chad Orzel posted a cute bit about True Lab Stories: The Party Game. I like these things because, yes, they make it clear that those of us who do science put coffee cups on top of our cars and drive off, just like everyone else. For those of who are thinking about careers in science, you don't always have to be brilliant, what you need is perseverance. I can share one story from the lab where I was a graduate student. One day, one of our visiting scientists came to me with a thermometer. "It's not working!" he said. I was skeptical, but I took a look. The thermometer was really dirty…

Isaac Newton's Holiday Countup

On Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel counts up toward the birthday of that most holy of men: Sir Isaac Newton. Each day Orzel will (hopefully) unveil a new gem that didn't make it into his exciting new book. On Day 1, Chad wrote about the apocryphal moment of inspiration—in a bathtub—that led the Greek polymath Archimedes to first exclaim "Eureka!" And for Day 2, Orzel considers the scientific origin of art among prehistoric peoples in southern Africa. He writes, "The pigment-grinding process wasn’t a simple thing that might happen by accident, but a multi-step process, involving grinding then…

How Alien Can a Spacefarer Be?

As our planet makes more and more noise, we can't help but wonder why no one is paying attention. Are we alone in the universe? Or alone in our desire to discover new worlds? PZ Myers says "Spaceship building is never going to be a selectively advantageous feature — it’s only going to emerge as a spandrel, which might lead to a species that can occupy a novel niche." Humanity could tread that path, following our dreams to the stars. But even then, we might only find extraterrestrials in the form of well-adjusted slime blobs, content in their otherworldly ecosystems. If there are other tech-…

Denialists are Doomed

It's been a frigid winter in much of the United States, but Greg Laden notes that the country covers only 1.5% of the Earth's surface, and overall the planet just experienced the fourth-warmest January on record.  Meanwhile global warming denialists are resorting to every rhetorical trick in the book, such as comparing their increasingly outnumbered position to that of Galileo.  While it's tempting to recount the history of science as that of a few brilliant mavericks overthrowing established consensus, Greg writes "Science hardly ever gets Galileoed, and even Galileo did not Galileo science…

Confidence on Warming from IPCC

The fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was released last week, saying that global warming is occurring without a doubt, and human activity is extremely likely to be the cause.  Greg Laden shares a number of graphics from the report, summarizing "It is getting hotter. It is getting wetter, or dryer, depending on where you are. And the big ice hat our planet wears is falling off."  Peter Gleick collates a number of excerpts related to water on Significant Figures, which say that there are likely more regions getting more rain than less; the frequency of…

Endlessly Adaptable Animals

Dr. Dolittle spent a few days at the Experimental Biology meeting of the American Physiological Society, learning incredible facts about animal adaptability. In the Sunday session, researchers showed that metabolic byproducts called ketones can protect against seizures caused by hyperbaric oxygen therapy, while seal pups, who fast for up to three months once weaned, increase their insulin resistance and become effectively diabetic. Monday taught us that insects lack lungs, instead exchanging gas through tiny valves called spiracles along their abdomen, while a Burmese python, after eating a…

Outmaneuvering Influenza

Flu season is gearing up in the northern hemisphere, and this year's strains appear more virulent than usual.  In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control declared an epidemic on January 11; the CDC estimates that between 3,000 and 49,000 people die from influenza or its complications every year.  By comparison, the infamous flu of 1918 may have killed 500,000 Americans.  Although the very young, elderly, and diseased bear the highest risk of death, healthy adults still bear the responsibility of minimizing overall transmission of the virus.  In other words, everyone should get…

Animal Bodies Rearranged

On Pharyngula, PZ Myers considers a computer model which posits that bones are simply exoskeletons turned inside-out. Myers writes “We know from the homology of the patterning molecules involved that vertebrates and invertebrates are upside-down relative to each other, so at some point an ancestor flipped.” Such major differences in body plan arise during embryonic development, driven by highly evolved genetic instruction. But the growth of internal and external skeletons depends on distinct biological mechanisms, leading PZ to call the dataless computer model “abiological and ahistorical…

Threatening Zoonoses

Filovirus Entry by AJ Cann Two weeks after an outbreak of Ebola in Uganda, the same disease is circulating in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But the outbreaks have been caused by two distinct subtypes of virus, meaning they were not spread from one country to the other. The same thing happened in 1976, when over 500 people died in the two regions, hundreds of miles apart. Tara C. Smith asks, “Is this just coincidence that Ebola has twice now broken out in two different places at the same time, but with different viral subtypes?” If not, and specific environmental or ecological…

Runaway Warming

The extent of Arctic sea ice undulates like a yearly sine wave—rising in October, peaking in winter, and melting all spring and summer. This September we are likely to observe the lowest of lows; Greg Laden writes "There is less sea ice in the Arctic Circle than recorded in recent history." More ice has also melted in Greenland this season, with 4 weeks still to go. Greg says, "glacial melting is both more important than one might think and also more complicated." For example, the albedo of Greenland's ice sheet (the proportion of sunlight reflected back into the atmosphere) varies depending…

Four-Legged Medical Models

Animals serve as useful models in medical research—but they also serve as models for our anthropocentric fantasies. On Life Lines, Dr. Dolittle reports that researchers were able to "restore locomotion in paralyzed rats using a combination of nerve stimulation and engaging the mind by having the rats complete simple tasks." The rats, outfitted with a "support jacket" to provide external stimulation, learned to walk and even sprint to their favorite snack. Dr. Dolittle writes "the nerves had actually reorganized to create new connections around the injury site" and "these new research findings…

Tisn't the Season

Spring is in the air, and Clostridium tetani is in the earth. On Casaubon's Book, Sharon Astyk writes "with playing in the dirt comes minor injuries that you really don’t want to turn into anything nasty." Infection through open wounds can be fatal, as the bacterium releases a neurotoxin that causes uncontrolled muscular contractions. So if it's been ten years or more since your last vaccination, now is a good time for a booster. Meanwhile, Dr. Dolittle shares the amazing winning images of the inaugural Bio-Art competition on Life Lines. From the discharge of electric fish to the…

Editor Does What's Right (for Wrong)

On Deltoid, Tim Lambert reports that Wolfgang Wagner, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Remote Sensing, has taken personal responsibility for the publication of a "problematic" paper and resigned his role. Wagner writes, "With this step I would also like to personally protest against how the authors and like-minded climate sceptics have much exaggerated the paper's conclusions," in stories such as "New NASA data blow gaping hole in global warming alarmism" (published by Forbes) and "Does NASA data show global warming lost in space?" (published by Fox News). On Class M, James Hrynyshyn asks "…

Living by Light

Jellyfish aren't reknowned for specialized organs; they lack brains, guts, hearts, and lungs. But some of them have eyes in spades. Mo writes on Neurophilosophy that box jellyfish have "24 eyes contained within a club-shaped sensory apparatus called a rhopalium, one of which is suspended from each side of the cube-shaped umbrella by a flexible, muscular stalk." A crystal called a stratolith weighs down each of the four rhopalia and ensures that the "upper lens eyes remain in a strictly upright position, regardless of body orientation." For the first time, researchers have shown that the…

Successful Science Writing

On Confessions of a Science Librarian, John Dupuis considers the keys to writing a successful science book, such as The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Most important, says John, is crossover appeal: "normally picky reviewers loved TILoHL because it's more than 'just' a science book. They saw it as a book that's also about people and society and ethics." John has a list of specific strategies to make a book appeal to a broader audience. Meanwhile, Chad Orzel offers insight into the writing process behind the sequel to How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, a popular science book from 2009…

Mapping Frontiers

The science of cartography has come a long way over the centuries, from the caricatured coastlines of antiquity to the highly-detailed satellite images of today. We know our terrestrial boundaries very well, and until all the polar ice melts and raises sea levels, mapmakers are busy looking elsewhere. Greg Laden explores the magma chamber beneath Yellowstone, which was modelled by observing the transmission of shock waves through the earth's crust. Greg explains, "This sonar-like approach allows the mapping of underground three-dimensional structure," and he has the pictures to prove it…

Think of an Elephant

There's an old parable about blind men and an elephant; each touches a different part of the great beast and comes to a wildly different conclusion about what stands before them. This parable shares some similarities with science, since we're all probing the secrets if the universe in different places and ways. Unlike the ancient blind men, however, we have the advantage of things like blogs to compare notes between what we find. Take the elephant itself: today's links examine pachyderms from three different perspectives. At The Thoughtful Animal, Jason Goldman looks at elephantine…

Sometimes ink is just ink

At first, I was a bit disappointed in this result, but then I realized it's actually rather interesting in a negative sense. Investigators tested the effects of squid ink on other squid; the entirely reasonable idea being that it could contain an alarm pheromone that would have the function of alerting neighboring squid in the school of trouble. It works — adding ink to a tank of Caribbean reef squid sends them scurrying away. However, when they removed the pigments from the ink and added that, the squid couldn't care less. That says there is no chemical signal, only a visual signal. That…

There is no religion of peace

I've been hiding from the horrible news in the Middle East, but this story induced me to poke my head out of my tortoise shell…so I can puke. A rabbi consulted his holy books to see what God had to say about the vicious violence going on right now, and you can guess what God's word might be: Eliyahu ruled that there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket launchings. Of course. Did we expect anything else? No moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of…

This Day In History

On June 17th, 1858 (I know, I missed by less than an hour), Charles Darwin received a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace. The letter contained the explanation of the principle of natural selection. Thus, Darwin was forced to act, and act fast. After reading both Wallace's and his own acccount of natural selection to the Royal Society, he got down to work. Instead of a multi-tome monograph he was planning on writing (which, if nothing else due its sheer size, would not have had quite as wide readership), he quickly jotted down a slim volume which, for the Victorian era, was a surprisingly…

As you've noticed, we're experiencing technical difficulties

We're having some major performance problems, as is obvious from all the errors you're getting when you try to post comments. We had some substantial tweaks made to the code behind the scenes that was supposed to improve performance, but actually had exactly the opposite effect — now Scienceblogs is supposed to be bringing in some expert consultants very soon now to fix the problems, either rolling back the code or figuring out why we aren't getting any speed boost at all. I don't know when this will happen, since there are a lot of blogs here, and they all need to be patched somehow. We're…

"Scientists for a better PCR" (hat tip Scienceblogs.de)

Scienceblogs has a German cousin, Scienceblogs.de where I found this absolutely hilarious YouTube music video, "Scientists for a better PCR." Yes, it's an advert for a PCR device called a thermocycler but it's incredibly funny -- if you have that kind of sense of humor. PCR is a technique called polymerase chain reaction. It can take pre-specified tiny bits of DNA or RNA and grow them up into huge amounts. That's how they can do forensic DNA identification from the small amounts in spit or semen stains. They pre-specify parts of DNA that are unique to an individual and amplify it up by PCR.…

Hungarian phrasebook sketch comes to life

Whenever I see a magazine with Chinese calligraphy on the cover, which I cannot read at all, I have to wonder if it means something strange, like "My nipples explode with delight". The journal of the Max Planck Research Institute was hit by this little problem: they used some lovely Chinese calligraphy on their cover without looking up the meaning. Translation: With high salaries, we have cordially invited for an extended series of matinées KK and Jiamei as directors, who will personally lead jade-like girls in the spring of youth, Beauties from the north who have a distinguished air of…

Not So Fast!

Salivary Melatonin May Help Fight Gum Disease: Researchers found that melatonin, a hormone created by the pineal gland, may be able to protect the oral cavity against free radicals produced by inflammatory diseases. Melatonin has strong antioxidant effects that can protect cells against inflammatory processes and oxidative damage. -------------- "Patients with higher salivary and melatonin ratios had lower community periodontal index (CPI). CPI is the score used to assess periodontal status," said Pablo Galindo, DDS, Department of Oral Surgery, School of Dentistry, University of Granada,…