General biology
tsmith | June 26, 2006This is big.
The world's leading scientists yesterday urged schools to stop denying the facts of evolution amid controversy over the teaching of creationism.
The national science academies of 67 countries - including the UK's Royal Society - issued a joint statement warning that scientific evidence about the origins of life was being "concealed, denied, or confused". It urged parents and teachers to provide children with the facts about the origins and evolution of life on Earth.
This is a nice foil to a recent post on the Discovery Institute's "Evolution News and Views blog," noting that…
tsmith | June 26, 2006When I mention "bugs", I usually mean the microscopic kind. However, last week and this weekend have put me on a macroscopic "bug" kick.
We were out camping this weekend in central Iowa. My kids found this beast by the bathroom:
For size comparison, that's my cell phone at the top of the pic:
Apparently, it's a Cecropia silkmoth, the largest moth in N. America (range here). It was nice enough to sit around and pose for a few pictures before it flew off:
According to this site (describing the rearing of a Cecropia moth), it's probably a male--those antennae look pretty giant to me…
tsmith | June 26, 2006...according to a new Nature News story.
Migraine sufferers might soon be able to block an imminent attack using a device that targets the brain with a powerful magnetic field.
The technique, called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), triggers activity in the brain's nerve cells and is already being tested as a way to treat depression. Two small clinical trials have now shown that delivering TMS to the brain in the early stages of a migraine seems to halt it in its tracks.
Since I've dealt with migraines for a long time, this sounds great (though I'll note that the research hasn't yet…
tsmith | June 24, 2006More interesting topics I didn't mention here this week.
Over at Effect Measure is an excellent post discussing a topic I've touched on here mainly just in the comments section: diagnostic testing (and the pitfalls thereof).
Alex depresses me regarding NIH funding stats, but unlike many of us who just grouse about it, he has some interesting suggestions about ways to actually deal with it in the long-term.
DarkSyde interviews physicist Sean Carroll (of Cosmic Variance, discussing the "Big Bang," dark matter, dark energy, and string theory.
Forensics for jr. high and high-schoolers as…
tsmith | June 20, 2006[From the archives; originally posted November 25, 2005]
I discussed here new research on venom evolution that topples some old conventional wisdom. It seems this and another study are already making large waves in that field.
Genealogy of Scaly Reptiles Rewritten by New Research
The most comprehensive analysis ever performed of the genetic relationships among all the major groups of snakes, lizards, and other scaly reptiles has resulted in a radical reorganization of the family tree of these animals, requiring new names for many of the tree's new branches. The research, reported in the…
tsmith | June 20, 2006[From the archives; originally posted November 22, 2005]
Carl Zimmer has a post today about the work of Dr. Bryan Grieg Fry on the evolution of snake venom. If that name sounds familiar to those of you who aren't reptile specialists, you may have run across Dr. Fry's homepage, or you may have seen his research profiled previously on Panda's Thumb here, or you may have read comments by the good doc in this thread. Zimmer, as always, has an excellent overview of Fry et al's new paper in Nature (link ), but he didn't emphasize the one sneak peek I received from Bryan.
This tasty bit of…
tsmith | June 19, 2006[From the archives; originally posted November 28, 2005]
Have you ever wondered how Kevin Bacon and the lights of fireflies related to malaria and power grids? I know it's something that's kept me up many a sleepless night. One word: interconnections.
Many of you have probably heard of the "Six degrees of Kevin Bacon"game. This is based on the work of Stanley Milgram beginning in the 1960s, and brought up again more recently in a 1998 Nature paper, "Collective Dynamics of 'Small-World' Networks," by mathematicians Watts and Strogatz. Milgram conducted a number of studies using his "lost…
tsmith | June 16, 2006[From the archives; originally posted October 20, 2005]
Measles is one of those diseases that we don't give much thought to in the United States anymore. Following an incubation period of about 10 days, flu-like symptoms appear: fever, malaise, cough, congestion, conjunctivitis. Soon, the rash appears, first near the ears, then the forehead, the face, and over the rest of the body. Complications were common. These could include a seconary bacterial pneumonia, encephalitis, myocarditis, miscarriage, and a condition called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE).
(Continued below...)
SSPE…
tsmith | June 16, 2006Welcome to the June edition of Animalcules! Apologies for the lateness; I only had a few minutes to get online yesterday, and that was mainly devoted to checking email and making sure there were no crises that needed my attention. So, without further ado...
From the Scientific Creative Quarterly comes a humorous entry: Prokaryotes of America Unite. Almost makes me feel bad. (You also may want to check out Scientific Creative Quarterly editor David Ng's new blog here at Scienceblogs: The World's Fair.
Jennifer over at Science Matters has a nice post discussing background information on…
tsmith | June 15, 2006[From the archives; originally posted November 16, 2005]
I know, everyone's so sick of all the new "omics"es. But "metagenomics" is one that I don't see going away anytime soon. At its core, metagenomics is a way of looking at organisms in concert as a complex ecology, rather than as an individual, as genomic analysis has traditionally been done. Rather than isolating 10 different species of bacteria from, say, a gram of soil and analyzing them all separately, a metagenomics strategy would investigate all the organisms in the soil (or in sea water, dental plaque, or even human feces). A huge…
tsmith | June 14, 2006[From the archives; originally published November 18, 2005]
Malaria is one of the world's leading infectious killers. World-wide, almost 40% of the world's population is at risk of acquiring this disease--many of them in poor countries with limited resources to control the disease. Each year, malaria causes 300-500 million infections, and up to 3 million deaths--about 5000 Africans die of the disease every day; one child succumbs every 30 seconds. Mosquito-borne, simple devices (such as mosquito nets over beds) have been shown to drastically decrease the incidence of disease. Though these…
tsmith | June 14, 2006[From the archives; originally posted October 27, 2005]
Pili (singular: pilus) are bacterial organelles--thin tubes of protein that function in attachment and bacterial sex, as well as immune evasion. Traditionally, studies of pili have been carried out in gram-negative bacteria, such as E. coli and Neisseria species; very little was known about pili in gram-positives. A few recent high-profile papers have changed that.
Back in July, an Italian group analyzed the genomic sequences of 2 isolates of Streptococcus agalactiae, or group B streptococcus, in order to identify surface proteins…
tsmith | June 13, 2006 Sometimes it's amazing just how little we know about the microbes around us. For precious few microbes, we know a good deal about virulence factors--genes and proteins that, when present, increase the severity of disease either in animal models or in humans (or both). However, much of this research has been done investigating acute infectious diseases, where one is infected, becomes ill, and gets better in the course of a few weeks to a month. Much less is known about factors that affect long-term (or chronic) infection. A recent study addressed one gap in this research, examining what…
tsmith | June 11, 2006Like a Saturday roundup, but a day delayed. Some other topics I found interesting this week, but didn't have a chance to elaborate on...
Afarensis mentions new research on the evolution of the Crenarchaeota, a group of archae.
Laura Bush speaks on the President's malaria initiative.
Both Ed and Janet muse on the FDA approval of the new HPV vaccine--and ramifications thereof.
Via Eastern blot, 2006's Art of Science winners.
Wanna work at Seed? They're looking for fall interns; deadline is July 6th.
And of course, don't forget to send in your submissions for this week's Animalcules…
tsmith | June 9, 2006I wrote recently how evolution and phylogenetic analysis of HIV isolates has provided evidence that the progenitor to HIV jumped into humans in Cameroon or a nearby area. Obviously it's a topic that's interesting to me, but may seem a bit esoteric to some. RPM over at Evolgen has a new post showing another application of phylogenetic analysis to HIV that may be of interest to readers here, where infectious disease epidemiology meets CSI.
tsmith | June 9, 2006The new issue of Nature Medicine has a number of excellent articles on topics in infectious disease. I'm going to discuss a few of them in more detail next week (or possibly the week after; next week will be a short one for me), but in the meantime, I'll highlight two articles in particular that may interest readers: Here on the midwest mumps outbreak, and this story on phage therapy to treat "superbug" infections. (It just happens to be written by Thomas Häusler, who is the author of the book I reviewed in this post.
tsmith | June 9, 2006Over at Doc Around the Clock, Dr. IBear has a nice post on Lyme disease: what it is, what it's not, and how to deal with ticks (appropriately, not as his mom removed them). He mentions this:
Most of the time people who get Lyme disease don't even know or remember being bitten by a tick. Thus, it stands to reason that if you do remember being bitten by a tick you probably don't have Lyme disease.
I want to elaborate on this just a bit, below.
A reason many people don't realize they've been bitten is because when the tick bites the human to transmit the Borrelia spirochete, it's not always a…
tsmith | June 8, 2006The summer 2006 edition of Stanford Medical Magazine has devoted their issue to "The evolutionary war." Being the alumni magazine of a medical school, of course they have an article on "Darwin in medical school." It's a nice overview, discussing a bit of the history of "Darwinian medicine" and the pros and cons of teaching it in an already over-scheduled medical school curriculum. More after the jump...
Randolph Nesse, who I mentioned in this post and is considered one of the fathers fo "Darwinian medicine," argues for the inclusion of evolutionary medicine in med school curricula:
...…
tsmith | June 7, 2006Antibiotic resistance gets a lot of attention, but it's not the only kind of drug resistance that's of concern. Derek of In the Pipeline has a post up discussing resistance to cancer therapies.
tsmith | June 5, 2006Yesterday, the New York Times op-ed by John Moore and Nicoli Nattrass discussing denial of HIV. They also featured an article suggesting that more human-to-human transmission of H5N1 has occurred than previously thought.