heathero | June 6, 2011The arsenic story continues. After much discussion in the blogosphere and elsewhere about the controversial paper claiming to have discovered life that uses arsenic rather than phosphorus in its DNA, Science has published 8 critiques of the paper and a response by the author. You can find them here. I enjoyed reading them, and was surprised at how different they all were. I am not going to dive into this because the details are summarized in Nature News, and Carl Zimmer has a great piece for Slate that also discusses the recent developments in the context of the whole story and the broader…
kbonham | June 2, 2011This was the scene from my front porch last night:
Pictures of lightning are cool and all, and I've been in thunderstorms before. The crazy thing about this storm was the shear frequency of it.
Here in Boston, we went outside and enjoyed the light show. Throughout the neighborhood, we could hear people cheering every time there was a particularly large bolt. Other people in the state, though, weren't having such a great time:
BOSTON -- Residents of Springfield began cleaning up Thursday after the first tornadoes to hit Massachusetts in three years killed four people, destroyed buildings…
kbonham | June 1, 2011You've all heard of Malaria. It's bad. It infects hundreds of millions of people, mostly in developing nations. It rarely leads directly to death*, but the resulting illness can lay people out for days or weeks, increasing an already heavy economic burden on many of the poorest countries in the world.
Folks from affluent regions can get medication to prevent or treat the illness, but treatments can be expensive and have nasty side effects, so it's not practical for most of the population. The good news is that Plasmodium, the parasite that causes the disease, can only be transmitted by…
kbonham | May 11, 2011Maryn McKenna has a typically great post about the rise and spread of a strain of multi-antibiotic resistant Staph aureus. It arose in Holland, where it spread to pigs, picked up resistance to the antibiotic tetracycline, and then jumped back into humans. Then it spread across the EU and into the US.
As is often the case, reading McKenna's blog is fascinating, but sobering.
One of the persistent mysteries about ST398 is how far it has spread in the U.S.. That's a very difficult question to answer, because no one is consistently doing the tests that would provide data. The national meat-…
kbonham | May 10, 2011Over at the Cambridge Science Festival blog, there's a great write-up of the science journalism event that Heather and I attended last week. Author Jordan Calmes* has good summary and a lot of praise for the panel discussion, but also notes some potential shortcomings:
The panel convinced me that social media is helping both journalists and scientists. And yet, I never felt like they delivered on the second half of the title. How is the Internet changing science writing? What is it really accomplishing in terms of reaching out to a wider public. The panel mentioned that social media is often…
kbonham | May 9, 2011Way back in high school bio, I learned about the 2 main ways that eukaryotic organisms (everything other than bacteria and archaea) make their metabolic living: photosynthesis and oxidative phosphorylation (also known as respiration). These two processes are fundamentally related - photosynthesis combines CO2 and water to produce sugar and oxygen, while respiration breaks down sugars using oxygen, leaving water and CO2. But the cells of plants, animals and fungi can't do either of these things on their own. Sometime in our distant evolutionary past, we took on tiny passengers that do the work…
heathero | May 8, 2011
As many of you are no doubt aware, both mitochondria and chloroplasts are thought to have come to us via microbial endosymbiosis (that is one cell living within another) with prokaryokes. Some photosynthetic bacteria eons ago found itself nestled inside another cell, realized it was a pretty sweet place to call home, and viola - a new cell organelle was born. OK fine, that is a bit of an oversimplification. The endosymbiotic theory is a bit more complicated, but that's the general idea. The details of how a symbiont over time could lose its unique identity and became a part of the host…
kbonham | May 4, 2011Last night, Heather and I got to attend a dinner and panel on science journalism and new media. In addition to getting to meet two of my science blogging heros, Carl Zimmer* and Ed Yong, it was a great opportunity to interact and hear from lots of folks far more tuned into the writing and journalism worlds than we are.
Heather and I want to get other people as excited about science as we are, and we want to communicate science our science, but we aren't trained writers. Any scientist can make a blog, but it takes a lot of effort to make it engaging or even readable. When I first started…
kbonham | May 3, 2011[A while back, I received a question from a reader via e-mail.
Dear Beasties:
If you had a mutation in either C4 or C5 which one would be worse... I guess the question is is it more important to have the ability to opsonize or the ability to lyse cells with the MAC complex?
I could have done some digging and given a perfunctory answer, but I decided instead to ask my friend Matt Woodruff, another 3rd year grad student in my program whose lab works on compliment, if he could provide an answer and a bit of background. I think you'll agree it was the right choice.
The Compliment System
by Matt…
kbonham | May 2, 2011If you don't live in/around Boston, feel free to move along. Otherwise:
Dear SITN followers,
For a number of years, Science in the News (SITN) has organized a free public lecture series in the Brigham Circle/Longwood Medical area. This spring, due to high demand, we are delighted to announce that we will be extending our lecture series into Cambridge! For our extended series we will be having the following exciting lectures:
May 4
Black Holes and Cosmic Roles: Understanding the Center of the Galaxy
May 18
The Mystery of Sleep: How Neuroscientists are Solving One of the Brains Most…
kbonham | May 1, 2011Last year, I was awarded an NSF graduate research fellowship. This fellowship pays my tuition and stipend for 3 years, so that my boss doesn't have to. This is a great help to our lab, though I don't really get much in the way of direct benefit* (other than a great line on my CV). Anyway, every year, we are required to submit an "activities report" that says what we've been doing with the money, which in the end is your money (if you pay taxes in the US that is). It's supposed to be written for a general audience, and since you all are paying for me to do the science that I love, I figured…
kbonham | April 21, 2011I wrote awhile back about an incredible book, Being Wrong by Kathryn Shultz. The author recently have a talk at a TED conference, and her talk has just been posted. I was honestly a bit disappointed by the talk, but it gives me a chance to highly recommend the book again. Read it, seriously.
kbonham | April 21, 2011When I first got into blogging, I thought I could carve out my niche talking about the microbiome - that enormous ecosystem of trillions living inside and on every one of us. However, it's become increasingly clear that writers far more skilled than I have also decided to tackle this weighty (2-5lbs on average) subject.
Take this new paper published yesterday in Nature, describing 3 different "enterotypes" - different ways of balancing that ecosystem. I saw it last night in my Nature RSS feed, and was hoping to tackle it today.
But Ed and Carl beat me to it with a couple of stereotypically…
heathero | April 18, 2011These days it is very hip to do things eXtreme. Don't believe me? Try googling "extreme". I suppose I have jumped on the bandwagon by studying life in one of the most "extreme" environments on Earth (deep sea hydrothermal vents). The environment I study is home to the most thermally tolerant organisms on the planet, living at temperatures well above 100°C (but not boiling because of the extreme pressure). Because of my research interests, I am always on the look out for new discoveries in the realm of "extremophiles" - organisms that thrive in extreme environments. Most of them can not…
kbonham | April 14, 2011I'm in the process of reading All the Devils are Here, and just got The Big Short for my birthday.
It would seem that the story of the financial crisis, the resulting economic slump, and the battles over how to fix it are stories of human greed, striving for self-interest and reckless (self-imposed) ignorance. Why?
Mencius went to see King Hui of Liang.
The king said, "Venerable sir, since you have not counted it far to come here, a distance of a thousand li, may I presume that you are provided with counsels to profit my kingdom?"
Mencius replied, "Why must your Majesty use that word 'profit…
kbonham | April 13, 2011Yesterday was my birthday, and I tend to use this time in April to re-up my commitment to all of those resolutions that I failed at around Jan 5th.
And add a new one: Data is the name of the game.
- Millions of cells in the incubator? Check!
- Freshly-made solutions and buffers? Check!
- 10-15 Western blots/week? Check!
- Will to live? Fading... but still there!
There's nothing worse than this phase in a scientific process. I know the answer to my question and now I just need to generate a few figures that are presentable for publication.
For instance:
That's a loading control for an assay…
kbonham | April 13, 2011I couldn't have said it better myself:
I believe in love and kindness,
I believe in helping hands
I believe in strong opinions
I believe in taking stands
I believe cooperation
Overcomes the steepest odds
I believe we have a fighting chance
I don't believe in gods.
Go read the whole thing - it's beautiful.
kbonham | April 12, 2011If you're in the greater Boston area, go get your beer on and learn some great science!
This is a reminder that Science by the Pint is tonight at 7pm at Tavern in the Square in Porter Square. As usual, we'll raffle off a $10 gift certificate for every 10 attendees.
We're bringing Welkin Johnson and his lab members to talk about how viruses like HIV replicate.
Heather had a great time last month - you can have a great time this month!
Beer, science... what's not to love?
kbonham | March 26, 2011Our immune system needs to be on a hair-trigger. When you breathe in a virus or a bacterium enters a cut on your arm, you don't want to mess around:
(disclaimer: most of what George Carlin says in the rest of that clip is not supported by the science (though it's funny as hell))
But all of that heavy immunological artillery is dangerous, and when it's directed at the wrong target, there can be a lot of collateral damage. Some of the most important parts of the immune system are mechanisms of tolerance - teaching the immune system to ignore the things that aren't a threat. For the innate…