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New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 18 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Also, check out the interview with our Section Editor for Aquatic and Marine Sciences, Craig McClain. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Rare Species Are Valued Big Time: It has recently been postulated that the value humans place on rarity could…

Patient-led "clinical trials" versus clinical research

In 2007, I wrote a series of posts about what I found to be a fascinating yet at the same time disturbing phenomenon, specifically self-experimentation by cancer patients using an as yet unapproved drug called dichloroacetate. If you'll recall, DCA is a small molecule drug that was used to treat congenital lactic acidosis in children through its inhibition of the enzyme pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase. This inhibition shifts the metabolism of glucose towards oxidative metabolism in the mitochondria and away from glycolysis, the product of which is lactic acid. In January 2007, Dr. Evangelos…

An "un-American suppression" of antivaccine views or good reporting?

I've been writing a lot of posts on what I like to call the "antivaccine dogwhistle." In politics, a "dog whistle" refers to rhetoric that sounds to the average person to be reasonable and even admirable but, like the way that a dog whistle can't be heard by humans because the frequency of its tone is higher than the range that humans can hear, most people don't "hear" the real message. However, the intended audience does hear the real message. The way the "dog whistle" works in politics is through the use of coded language recognizable to the intended audience but to which most other people…

Aw Schucks: When the world is NOT your oyster!

This is the eleventh of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Ilze Berzins.  When one hears the words “food-borne illness”, what comes to mind?  For me, I think of a medium rare, pink, juicy hamburger, or something like potato salad that may be made with mayonnaise containing raw eggs, or maybe a fresh green garden salad sprinkled with sprouts.   I am sure we have all heard about outbreaks or recalls surrounding these familiar dishes.  And the usual suspects contaminating these food stuffs are often bacteria with familiar names such as E.coli or Salmonella.   The fear of getting “food poisoning…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Acid, base, or woo (revisited)

As we continue our countdown to having reached one full year of woo (namely, the one year anniversary of Your Friday Dose of Woo), it's occurred to me that there's one form of woo that I've dealt with before, but haven't revisited. It's a bit of woo that's so monumentally silly that it's hard to believe that anyone can take it seriously, although I will admit up front that it is not quite as silly as homeopathy. It's close though. I'm talking, of course, about pH woo, the concept that pretty much every disease (or at least a whole heck of a lot of them) is caused by alterations in your blood…

Open Laboratory 2010 - submissions so far

The list is growing fast - check the submissions to date and get inspired to submit something of your own - an essay, a poem, a cartoon or original art. The Submission form is here so you can get started. Under the fold are entries so far, as well as buttons and the bookmarklet. The instructions for submitting are here. You can buy the last four annual collections here. You can read Prefaces and Introductions to older editions here. ============================ A Blog Around The Clock: What does it mean that a nation is 'Unscientific'? A Blog Around The Clock: My latest scientific paper:…

How bad is the Templeton Foundation?

Attention conservation notice: ~5600 words about a ~10,000 word article and two others totaling ~7500 words, all examining the Templeton Foundation. If you aren't interested in the ins and outs of the to and fro over the Templeton Foundation's influence, and the question of whether the longer piece â funded by Templeton critics â actually lands any blows on the Foundation, you might want to skip past this. Or read the bit above the fold to get the gist. Since last June, I've basically been sitting out the fights over the Templeton Foundation. The Templeton Foundation has a lot of money…

Trying to avoid the "cancer-causing" label, diesel manufacturers join the club

Tobacco companies did it.  Asbestos-peddlers did it.  Chromium users did it.  The list goes on and on.  When polluters and manufacturers of dangerous products feel threatened by scientific evidence that their pet compound is carcinogenic to humans, they will do everything money can by to avoid the "cancer-causing" label. The latest example comes from diesel-engine manufacturers.   Their efforts come just in time for a meeting of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) scheduled for June 5-12, 2012.  IARC, an agency within the World Health Organization, is convening an expert…

It isn't Waste if You Do It Right

A few days ago, the New York Times ran an article about the problem of manure handling on large farms. . From the title "Down on the Farm, an Endless Cycle of Waste," which completely misses the point that manure is not "waste" to the end, the article failed to ask any of the really pertinent questions raised by really large scale industrial agriculture and its chronic problems with manure handling. In function it is something like a Zamboni, but one that has crossed over to the dark side. This is no hockey rink, and it's not loose ice being scraped up. It's cow manure. Lots of cow manure.…

Gun control Part III - Some final questions for Matt and closing remarks

Go by and check out Matt's second response on gun control. I think this response is a good argument. After all, my arguments are correlative. It is impossible to do randomized controlled trials on whole countries after all. I would ask a few questions in response to this rebuttal, however. Matt, what do you think about about data that demonstrates, within our own country, higher gun prevalence correlates with higher homicide, independent of other risk factors? Can we really dismiss the potential impact of federal gun laws using local gun laws as an example? Its pretty clear from…

One does not simply "believe" in Dark Energy...

This is an enhanced version (with some upgraded images and text) of an article I first wrote over two years ago. It is just as valid today as it was back then, only today, I have a special offer to go with it. Next week, a bunch of cosmologists and myself are getting together and all writing about dark energy. And I want you to have your say. So at the end of this post, ask your dark energy questions. Ask anything and everything you ever wanted to know about dark energy. I'll choose the best one (or, space & time permitting, more than one) and write a special post on it for you then.…

Open Lab Update

The list is growing fast - check the submissions to date and get inspired to submit something of your own - an essay, a poem, a cartoon or original art. Continue to submit your best posts, and the best posts you read online. Especially those art/cartoon posts, and poems! The Submission form is here so you can get started. Under the fold are entries so far, as well as buttons and the bookmarklet. The instructions for submitting are here. You can buy the last four annual collections here. You can read Prefaces and Introductions to older editions here. Interested in the origins of this project?…

Snakes On The Plain: Kevin in China

Let's see how many people incapable of spelling 'plane' arrive here by the way of Google. But I am talking about a real 'plain' - a big one, in China, and about some very real live snakes as well! A good friend (and ex-neighbor) of mine, Kevin Messenger, is in China right now, surveying herpetofauna (that is - reptiles and amphibians, for the non-biologists here) in a remote area of central China, rarely visited by Weesterners, and never before surveyed by scientists. He is one of those natural-born herpetologists - he lives, breathes and dreams snakes. When I lived in Raleigh I would often…

What is 'Investigative Science Journalism'?

Background When Futurity.org, a new science news service, was launched last week, there was quite a lot of reaction online. Some greeted it with approval, others with a "wait and see" attitude. Some disliked the elitism, as the site is limited only to the self-proclaimed "top" universities (although it is possible that research in such places, where people are likely to be well funded, may be the least creative). But one person - notably, a journalist - exclaimed on Twitter: "propaganda!", which led to a discussion that revealed the journalist's notion that press releases are…

Discussion of the Padian paper

As promised, a discussion on the paper, Heterosexual transmission of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in northern California: results from a ten-year study. First, let's backtrack a bit and see what's already been said, lest I repeat myself. The little summary below can also catch anyone up who's not up to wading through 250-odd comments. Those who've already done so can skip the quoted parts and scroll down... [Note: I've uploaded a .pdf of the Padian paper for anyone to access Here.] Hank Barnes said here about the paper: 1. It was the longest and largest epidemiological study of…

What is the cause of excess costs in health care Part 4 - Time's "Bitter Pill", CEO compensation and the Kafkaesque chargemaster

Steven Brill's extensive piece in Time has generated a good discussion once again on why Americans pay so much more for health care than other countries, and while I agree with most of his critiques, he seems to have gotten overly hung-up on the hospital chargemaster. Readers of this blog know I've also discussed reform in health care, the diverse sources of excess cost including price gouging on pharmaceuticals, defensive medicine, expensive end-of-life care, the high cost of primary care in the ER etc, and both Brill and I appear to have relied on the same sources of data in the McKinsey…

Volcanism and society: What to do about Chaiten

I have never had to leave my home in an evacuation from a natural disaster. I'll put that out there right now. So, I might not fully understand the emotions going through people when they find out that they have to leave their home by no fault of their own because nature has decided that where they live is no longer livable. I especially don't know what it might be like if you are then told you can never go back. You might have a home there. You might own a business there. You might have grown up there. Your great grandparents might have lived there over 100 years ago. Yet, you are told -…

CDC recognizes the blogosphere

Our Flu Wiki partner, DemFromCT, has an important post up at DailyKos today. In June of 2005, Dem (The Next Hurrah), Melanie Mattson (Just a Bump in the Beltway) and The Reveres joined forces in an experiment in community public health planning we called The Flu Wiki. We were joined by our tech guru, the blogger, pogge (Peace, Order and Good Government, eh?), and after a time by anon_22. Anon_22 was "just another" wiki participant who chose her name arbitrarily, not thinking she would become a central figure. Based in the UK, she is a physician and soon became deeply engaged in the…

My picks from ScienceDaily

A cornucopia of interesting science today. As always, check if the press release matches the actual paper... Adaptation To Global Climate Change Is An Essential Response To A Warming Planet: Temperatures are rising on Earth, which is heating up the debate over global warming and the future of our planet, but what may be needed most to combat global warming is a greater focus on adapting to our changing planet, says a team of science policy experts writing in this week's Nature magazine. While many consider it taboo, adaptation to global climate change needs to be recognized as just as…

Expanding the right to know: California workers gain additional access to workplace toxics information as new hazards emerge

"If the California Public Health Department had been able to find out that my company was using a chemical that was killing people, I might never have gotten so sick that I had to have a lung transplant," Ricardo Corona told a California Judiciary Committee last April, testifying in favor of California Senate Bill (SB) 193 that Governor Jerry Brown signed into law on September 29th. The law, which amends California's Hazard Evaluation System and Information Service (HESIS), will become the first in the country to require companies that manufacture and distribute toxic chemicals to provide a…

New Frontiers: the first two years

A couple of years ago, the Templeton Foundation funded the New Frontiers program to pose "Big Questions" in some areas of science. This is a slow liveblog - part II will be tomorrow with more cosmology and life in the universe Seed funding was provided to 20 investigators and small groups to start exploratory research, and, now, it is time to say what they found. This follows up from the New Frontiers kick-off conference back in 2012. The New Frontiers conference to report the hint of the beginning of the draft of the answers is under way... most of the investigators and about half of the…

Post-election thoughts

Scattered thoughts, that is. ---------------------------- On Tuesday night I was teaching. Yup, my BIO101 class for adults. Scheduled for 6-10pm. But it was the mid-term exam day. I made an exam that can be done in two hours. I knew that my students were itchy to get it done and go home to watch the election returns. Many of them are African American as well. I sat there, with the computer on, browser open on TalkingPointsMemo, FiveThirtyEight, CNN.com, FriendFeed...watching as they announced Kantucky and Vermont, refreshing every couple of seconds. At 8pm I kicked the last couple of…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Carmen Drahl

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Carmen Drahl, Associate Editor for Science/Technology/Education at Chemical & Engineering News (find her as @carmendrahl on Twitter) to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more…

Study: Training parents as immunization advocates a promising approach to vaccine hesitancy

Protecting babies and children against dangerous — sometimes fatal — diseases is a core mission of public health. Everyday, in health departments across the nation, someone is working on maintaining and improving childhood vaccination rates and keeping diseases like measles and mumps from regaining a foothold in the U.S. Fortunately for us, public health has been so successful that it’s easy to forget what it was like just a few decades ago when measles was a common childhood illness. (Though here’s a reminder.) But sustaining vaccination rates that provide population-wide protection against…

The Boston Bombers: Something for everybody

Well, not everybody. First lets talk about some losers. Someday a brave journalist will ask the FBI why they had one of the suspects in sight a couple of years ago but this still happened. Chances are there is a very good answer and we should not be mad at the FBI for this, but at the moment, even asking the question will get people screaming at you. Someday a brave journalist will work out the details of how the State and Boston Police managed to miss the guy hiding in the boat a short distance form their dragnet. Chances are there is a very good reason for this, and we should not be mad…

Does the Internet need an HR Department?

Image from Reddit posted by user Lunam with the text "What my super religious mother got me for Christmass..." When a young girl put a picture of herself, holding a book she had just gotten as a present, on the social networking site reddit, she was immediately subjected to intense verbal sexual assault by reddit readers who aptly demonstrated how awful it can be when boys and young men are left to say and do what they want without the social control of anyone knowing who they are. When Skepchick founder Rebecca Watson casually tossed out some relationship advice for clueless young men…

The Demise of Climate Denialist and Fake Nobel Laureate/British Royal Christopher Monkton

Potholer54 has written a letter to Monkton that you will want to read, and he's also made a video that you will want to see. First the letter (from here): Open letter to Christopher Monckton - please return to the debate Dear Mr. Monckton, A couple of months ago you entered into a debate with me on wattsupwiththat.com (See "Update on the Monckton-Hadfield debate" - http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/07/update-on-the-monckton-hadfield-d…) about alleged errors in your public lectures - allegations that I made in a series of videos on my YouTube channel "Potholer54". But as soon as I presented…

A "Conversation" About the Founding Fathers

A couple days ago, I received an email from a correspondent named Nick, a man I've encountered in a political chat room before as well. He's one of those really hardcore religious right types who, as you will see, absolutely glories in his ignorance, and he was bound and determined to "educate" me. His initial e-mail simply said this: I know you are smarter than all of these folks but maybe you can learn something And then it had a link to this article on someone else's webpage. There's nothing original in the article. It is the same article that has been emailed around a million times, so…

Chris Mooney with a New Year's resolution for practicing scientists: engage more with the public and the media

Steve Silberman and Rebecca Skloot just pointed out to me an editorial from science writer Chris Mooney that has appeared online and will be in the Sunday, January 3rd edition of The Washington Post. In the essay, "On issues like global warming and evolution, scientists need to speak up," Mooney continues his longstanding call to scientists to take ownership in combating scientific misinformation, invoking the very weak response of the scientific community to the aftermath of e-mails and documents hacked from the Climatic Research Institute at the University of East Anglia. The central lesson…

Tracking Invasive Plant Species from the Air

How do you track the relative contributions of a plant species in an ecosystem? When you are talking about thousands of square miles of land area this can be an incredibly daunting task, but it is very important because it provides important information related to invasive species that may be displacing their native counterparts in an ecosystem. I remember in a biology course a Stanford we were shown how you perform experiments like this using trees in a nearby nature reserve. In order to a get a sense of the geographic distribution of different types of tree, we would walk around the park…

Ethical Stem Cells?

The press is all in a tizzy about so-called ethical stem cells, but this still indicates a really limited understanding of how embryonic stem (ES) cells work. (Frankly, if I had a dollar for every time I read bad reporting on ES cells, you and I would not be talking. I would be Tahiti...with Natalie Portman.) Anyway, in an article published in advance online in Nature, Klimanskaya et al. show that single cells derived from preimplanation genetic diagnosis (PGD) can be used to grow new stem cell lines. Some background: People go to in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics for a variety of…

So you want to write a pop-sci book, Part 4: Getting the word out

The time has come to wrap-up this blog series, but there was one other topic I wanted to cover before concluding; how do you let people know about the mass of ink-blotted, dead tree pulp that is your book? Promoting Written in Stone will be a tough job. When it hits shelves this fall it will undoubtedly be in competition with numerous other science titles for the chance of being reviewed in the few publications which still review science books at all. Book tours, too, have become nearly extinct, and as a virtually unknown science writer I don't expect many (any?) people to show up at their…

Restoring sight to the blind with deep brain stimulation - a World Changing Idea

John Pezaris emailed me yesterday to say: Last spring, you were kind enough to write an article for your Neurophilosophy blog covering my research into restoring sight to the blind, following the publication of our scientific paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Your article was one of the best ones written: I was really impressed at how accurately you summarized our work. I'd like to bring to your attention that the project has been named one of the 10 finalists for the Saatchi and Saatchi Award for World Changing Ideas. Congratulations to John Pezaris and…

IBC vs Les Roberts

Stephen Soldz posts an exchange of letters between the IBC's John Sloboda and Les Roberts. Sloboda accused Roberts of spreading misinformation about a NEJM study. Roberts said: In a very prestigious journal called the New England Journal of Medicine there was an article published on 1 July 2004. Military doctors interviewed soldiers returning from Iraq. They interviewed them because they were interested in post-traumatic stress disorder, so they asked the soldiers about stressful things that might have happened to them. Among other things they found that 14 percent of the ground forces in…

Mike Adams and "natural biopreparedness" against Ebola and pandemics

This one will be much shorter than usual, mainly because I was out late last night for a dinner function at which I was on a panel of breast cancer experts. I must admit, even after having been an attending surgeon for 15 years, it never ceases to make me feel a bit weird to be presented as a “breast cancer expert”—or an expert at anything, for that matter. It’s rather like how I sometimes feel a bit weird that skeptic groups still invite me to give talks. Ten years ago, I sucked at public speaking. Now I’m apparently good enough that people want to hear me. Go figure. In any event, I hate…

Brains Open Access Initiative

An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research - coming from their brains - in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The problem with this approach is that the brains are not exposed, just the thoughts, and that the brains available have been those physically accessible, such as those at the local university. Thus, those desiring to gain new knowledge through the consumption of peer-reviewed brains have been…

Legal thuggery directed at Steve Novella and Science-Based Medicine

If there’s one characteristic of supporters of dubious medicine, it’s that they detest criticism. Whereas your average skeptic might not like criticism—sensitivity to criticism being a human trait and all—science- and evidence-based criticism tends to drive dubious medical practitioners (and, I might add, promoters of various other forms of woo) into paroxysms of anger. Not infrequently, because they can’t refute such criticisms with science and evidence, they respond by lashing out, by going on the attack. That lashing out can take many forms, from simply writing abusive posts about their…

Stress

I've got a new article in the latest Wired on the science of stress, as seen through the prism of Robert Sapolsky. The article isn't online yet (read it on the iPad!), but here are the opening paragraphs: Baboons are nasty, brutish and short. They have a long muzzle and sharp fangs designed to inflict deadly injury. Their bodies are covered in thick, olive-colored fur, except on their buttocks, which are hairless. The species is defined by its social habits: The primates live in troops, or small groupings of several dozen individuals. These troops have a strict hierarchy, and each animal is…

"Popcorn Lung" Media Roundup

Over the past week, several newspapers and wire services have reported on the story we broke here at The Pump Handle about the first reported case of bronchiolitis obliterans in a microwave popcorn consumer â quickly followed by microwave popcorn manufacturersâ announcements about the removal of diacetyl from their products, and by additional calls from health advocates and members of Congress for federal agencies to address the problem. Itâs interesting to look at the different angles from which the various articles approach the topic, and the details they include. The Associated Press and…

The PTSD Trap - Extras (sources, links, a bit of multimedia)

Below are materials supplementing my story "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap," Scientific American, April 2009. (You can find the story here and my blog post introducing it here.) I'm starting with annotated sources, source materials, and a bit of multimedia. I hope to add a couple sidebars that didn't fit in the main piece -- though those may end up at the main blog, so you may want to keep an eye there or subscribe via RSS or Atom. Main sources and documents in "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap." These are organized by story section, roughly in the order the relevant material appears.…

From the Archives: Interview with Eugene Wallingford of Knowing and Doing

I'm on my annual summer hiatus for the month of July so I'll be only publishing my weekly Friday Fun posts as well as re-posting some of the interviews I did a few years ago on the old blog with people from the publishing, library and science worlds. Not that my posting of late has been particularly distinguishable from the hiatus state, but such is the blogging life after nearly ten years: filled with ups, downs, peaks, valleys. This interview, with Eugene Wallingford, is from July 9, 2008. I'm hoping to get these out weekly, but we'll see. They're mostly cobbled together in odd moments…

Necks for sex? No thank you, we're sauropod dinosaurs

If asked "Why do giraffes have such long necks?", the majority of people - professional biologists among them - will answer that it's something to do with increasing vertical reach and hence feeding range. But while the 'increased vertical reach' or 'increased feeding envelope' hypothesis has always been the most popular explanation invoked to explain the giraffe's neck, it isn't the only one. In 1996, Robert Simmons and Lue Scheepers argued that the giraffe neck functions as a sexual signal: they said that the necks of males are bigger and thicker than those of females, that the necks of…

The scam of "detox": Ritual purification by another name

"You need to detox." How many times have you heard or read this? Maybe a friend of yours suggested it for the New Year. Maybe you saw it on a website, in a magazine, or as part of an ad. I like to say sometimes, "Toujours les toxines," because in many branches of alternative medicine the overarching idea behind the interventions used is that vague, unnamed "toxins" are somehow poisoning you and that the only way to fix what's wrong with you is to "detoxify." These "detox" interventions can take many forms, ranging from the relatively (but not completely) benign, such as "juice cleanses," to…

Switching to Linux: One man's personal experience

Photographer Scott Rowed has penned an excellent essay on his experience making the switch to Linux, and he's agreed to place it here as a guest post. Please read it and pass it on to people, school districts, small island nations, and others who may benefit. This is a repost from about two years ago: Switching to Linux by Scott Rowed Changing operating systems is not a task to be taken lightly. I generally follow the philosophy "if it ain't broke don't fix it." A year ago, however, the family notebook was broken, hopelessly crippled by a nasty virus or worm. I'd been regularly updating the…

I am a nerd, you geeks! And I have a lava lamp!

This nerd thing going on is really bugging me. I went back and re-did the test, changing only 2 or 3 answers to what I did before (not lying, just taking the other one of two possibly correct answers) and got a much higher score: I agree with Jim that the quiz is not really measuring nerdiness so well. I'd argue that it actually measures geekiness instead. The questions are all about computers, math and Star Trek! And others have added Tolkien and slide-rules to the mix. I can barely figure out HTML after two years of blogging. Yeah, I played Pong with another friend when I was a kid,…

My Job in 10 Years -- The Book

Yes, the book. My Job in 10 Years: The Future of Academic Libraries. To rewind a bit, the story begins this past January. I did a little off-the-cuff post on how libraries could model their web presences on commercial book-related sites like Tor.com or the Globe & Mail Books site. It ended up being surprisingly popular, even getting picked up by AL Direct. Shortly after that, I was contacted by Christopher Rhodes of ALA Editions to see if I was interested in proposing a book for them about designing library web pages that way. (Thanks, Chris!) Well, like any good blogger, I've always…

Time's 'Hero For The Planet' Imprisoned in Brazil

tags: Marc van Roosmalen, primatology,monkeys, Brazil, research, biopiracy Dutch scientist Marc van Roosmalen (pictured) was sentenced to more than 15 years in prison for trying to auction off the names of several monkey species and for keeping monkeys at his house without proper authorization. Image: Eraldo Peres (AP). In a surprising move, the Brazilian government recently sentenced world renowned primatologist, Dr. Marc van Roosmalen, to nearly 16 years in prison. Van Roosmalen, who discovered seven species of monkeys and a new primate genus in the Amazon rainforest, was formally…

You can now start submitting your blog posts for the Open Laboratory 2010

Now that the 2009 edition of Open Laboratory, the fourth annual anthology of the best writing on science blogs, is out and getting the first (very positive!) reviews on blog and in the media, it's time to start looking ahead at the next year. Yesterday I cleaned up the submission form, made the necessary edits, and opened it up - please go to the new Submission Form and start entering the posts you consider worthy of publishing in the book. Each entry needs to be originally published as a blog post between December 1st 2009 and December 1st 2010 to be eligible. You can nominate as many…

Some Thoughts About My Book Reviews

I have been thinking about a book review that I published yesterday about David Attenborough's Life in Cold Blood. In short, my review of that particular book was positive, but not effusive. Because I focused on errors/ambiguous wordings and on what I think that book lacked, it is possible that I came across as being too harsh. As a result, I'd like to know if I should use an unambiguous rating system, such as something like Amazon's five star system, to help you quickly assess what I think of the book? I like to publish positive book reviews on my blog, and generally refuse to even finish…

Warrant issued against UCLA professor in 2008 workplace death of lab assistant

Sheri Sangji, 23, earned a bachelors degree in chemistry from Pomona College in 2008, and dreamed of being an attorney. While awaiting word on her admission to law school, Sangji took a job in October 2008 as a research assistant in the laboratory of UCLA chemistry professor Patrick Harran. Three months later, Sangji was dead. She suffered severe burns on December 29 while working in Harran's lab with tert-butyllithium (tBuLi), a substance that will spontaneously ignite when exposed to air. Despite expert care provided at the Grossman Burn Center in Sherman Oaks, Sangji succumb to her…