Interesting science news

A Mummy's DNA May Help Solve The Mystery Of The Origins Of Smallpox

The surprise find of smallpox DNA in a child mummy from the 17th century could help scientists start to trace the mysterious history of this notorious virus.

Smallpox currently only exists in secure freezers, after a global vaccination campaign eradicated the virus in the late 1970s. But much about this killer remains unknown, including its origins.

Now scientists have the oldest complete set of smallpox genes, after they went hunting for viral DNA in a sample of skin from a mummified young child, probably a boy, that was found in a crypt underneath a Lithuanian church.

I never got my smallpox vaccine. I was sick when it was scheduled and when I came back, they weren't giving them anymore here in the US, as we were on the road to eradication. But I'm the only person my age I've met who didn't have one.

Mix of Graphene With ‘Silly Putty’ Yields Extremely Sensitive Sensor

Mixing graphene—a material made of single-atom-thick layers of carbon—with homemade “Silly Putty” produces a sensor so sensitive that it can detect the tiny footsteps of spiders, according to new research.

The uses could be endless, but include wearable health trackers.

Yes, we need the liberal arts, too!

Why America's obsession with STEM education is dangerous

Creativity, writing skills, and the ability to think are truly important to our future. Technical skills are important, but they blossom when coupled with the benefits of a liberal arts education as well. For example, I give you:

That 'Useless' Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech's Hottest Ticket

Hee hee

Why Is Life Left-Handed? The Answer Is In The Stars

While most humans are right-handed, our proteins are made up of lefty molecules. In the same way your left and right hands mirror one another, molecules can assemble in two reflected structures. Life prefers the left-handed version, which is puzzling since both mirrored types form equally in the laboratory. But a new study suggests that this may be because the star-forming cloud that created the first-ever biological molecule, before our sun was even born, made it left-handed.

I once took a class that blended astronomy and biology into the interesting topic of extraterrestrial life. When we got to the point of left-handed vs. right-handed amino acids, someone asked what would happen if we met people from another planet with right-handed ones. The teacher's answer? 'Then we would not be able to eat them.' Imagine that in a thick Israeli accent. I loved Dr Elitzur's sense of humour. You've got to love those theoretical astrophysicists.

Fighting stereotypes with humour--and truth :)

BBC Trending: Female scientists post 'distractingly sexy' photos

Female scientists have been sharing "distractingly sexy" photos of themselves after a feminist website encouraged them to respond to comments by a Nobel laureate. Nobel Prize winner Tim Hunt was roundly criticised when he detailed his thoughts about the "trouble with girls" at a conference of science journalists. "Three things happen when they are in the lab," he said, "you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry."

He said his comments were meant to be "light-hearted, ironic comment", but whatever the intention, it went over like a heavy metallic dirigible in a field with some widely acknowledged gender issues. Hunt has now resigned from his position at University College London.

On Thursday the hashtag #DistractinglySexy began taking off, with more than 10,000 tweets in a matter of hours. The trend was prompted by a shout-out by the feminist online magazine Vagenda which urged female scientists to share pictures of themselves at work.

and then there was this:

The unseen women scientists behind Tim Hunt’s Nobel prize

Hunt calls women scientists “girls”, as though they are immature, and incapable of forwarding academia in any serious way. He suggests they disturb serious, hard-working men in their scientific pursuit. Yet Hunt knows women who have bolstered to his own success. He is obviously aware of the ground-breaking research women are doing in science; he is certainly more aware than any member of the public, and many of those criticising him. Is it that only some women are distractions, or maybe he thinks he would have won several Nobel Prizes if there were no women around?

It is obvious that his comments were sexist, but few people could recognise the names or faces of the women he has so thoughtlessly brushed aside. Even in his inadequate apology, he neglected to mention any women scientists who have impressed him during his career, choosing instead to justify himself with unsolicited details about his love life. Many have railed against Hunt’s casual chauvinism, without questioning why positive remarks about women are still missing. Would such comments be irrelevant? Unless we acknowledge the stories of women he has forgotten, a negative portrayal of women once again takes centre stage.

Interesting

High-definition scans suggest effects of smoking may be seen in unborn babies

The harmful effects of smoking during pregnancy may be reflected in the facial movements of mothers’ unborn babies, new research has suggested.

Researchers at Lancaster and Durham universities said the findings of their pilot study added weight to existing evidence that smoking is harmful to fetuses as they develop in the womb and warranted further investigation.

Professor Brian Francis, of Lancaster University, said: “Technology means we can now see what was previously hidden, revealing how smoking affects the development of the fetus in ways we did not realise. This is yet further evidence of the negative effects of smoking in pregnancy.”

Am I the only one who thinks it's lavender and gold???

The Science Of Why This Dress Looks Different Colors To Different People

I must admit

that is is more convenient to use a cable connexion for the Internet, rather than posting via my phone or using my laptop tethered to my phone or as my phone as a hotspot, hence the fact that I haven't blogged over the last few days. Plus, I've been pretty busy over the weekend, and I basically have come home and just crashed. Today I expected to do just that. I was in check-out again, for one, and then went over to my friends' house to work on something that lasted till 10 pm. But I came home and popped some popcorn for dinner, ate a clementine (hey, they were about all I had, except for some oatmeal and some canned spinach), and then had some hot chocolate. Fortunately I would normally be paid on Christmas, but instead will be paid Christmas Eve, or even, hopefully, near midnight tomorrow, so I can take care of some bills that have been piling up and causing my phone to ring 12 or more times a day. But tomorrow is my last day to work this week. I have a lot to do while I'm off:

1. Pay bills.
2. Take back my cable box and modem.
3. Really work on the house.
4. Fix latkes for a friend for Chanukah.
5. Work on a project with him rearranging his library desk.
6. Go visit my mom.
7. Finish the game notes.
8. Play the game.
9. Return a book to the library.

So there's a couple of videos I enjoyed over the weekend, one found by Brenda and the other by YKWIA, that I'd like to share here:

First, the one Brenda told us about:



and then YKWIA found this very sweet love song:



Hope you enjoy them. Okay, it is getting late. One more day of work before I get a five-day break, so I should get to bed and get up early and do well. Good night!

Why, yes we do need more women in science and engineering, especially in leadership roles

Why It's Crucial to Get More Women Into Science

Amid growing signs that gender bias has affected research outcomes and damaged women's health, there’s a new push to make science more relevant to them.

I'm not Catholic, but I really like Pope Francis

especially compared to the last one. Here's the latest from him: Pope Francis on Board With Science: Evolution and the Big Bang Are Real, God's Not a "Magician"

Yes! We need more of this!

Dedicated to my friend Tracy, a mechanical engineer at NASA. :)

Who controls the information about your genes?

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the Sequel by Rebecca Skloot

Last week, scientists sequenced the genome of cells taken without consent from a woman named Henrietta Lacks. She was a black tobacco farmer and mother of five, and though she died in 1951, her cells, code-named HeLa, live on. They were used to help develop our most important vaccines and cancer medications, in vitro fertilization, gene mapping, cloning. Now they may finally help create laws to protect her family’s privacy — and yours.

The family has been through a lot with HeLa: they didn’t learn of the cells until 20 years after Lacks’s death, when scientists began using her children in research without their knowledge. Later their medical records were released to the press and published without consent. Because I wrote a book about Henrietta Lacks and her family, my in-box exploded when news of the genome broke. People wanted to know: did scientists get the family’s permission to publish her genetic information? The answer is no.

Skloot's book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, details the various ways science, in its press to go forward, did so with certain degree of ignorance and disregard for the people who were genetically connected to the most successful cell line in history. The HeLa line saved millions (among so many other things, it was used to develop the polio vaccine), but science never seems to be able to get it right when dealing with the family Henrietta Lacks left behind. Now they've stumbled yet again. At least the team did apologise when they heard of the family's reaction, and took down the data they'd made public, but of course that's like shutting the barn door after the horses have escaped, as it was downloaded and most likely deseminated.

In the United States there are laws that protect seemingly every bit of medical privacy, laws that weren't extant when Lacks lived and died. But laws related to research are still a bit murky. Can someone take tissue or samples from you, remove direct connexion to your name and then publish your genome or use your cells in research without your consent, patenting the result, reaping billions? Science is moving fast, and our legal and ethics system isn't necessarily moving fast enough. Even with consent, most people don't realise what they're signing; they don't understand the legalese or the medicalese, not because of stupidity, but because it's complex and they're untrained in it. So ethics would suggest that we protect those who don't have the knowledge to truly make informed consent by at the very least requiring it be said in simple terms, and, respecting the wishes of those who would rather not participate. Personally I think it's rather wrong to profit from a person's material without compensation or knowledge, unless expressly donated. I recognise the cells are doing nothing sitting in a tube without the scientific manipulation and development, but at the same time, the person or heirs should at least share in the ownership of the cells, which came from his or her body. Would that cripple scientific research? Probably not.

A good year for science

Discovery of Higgs Boson rated year's top scientific achievement by Science: Other discoveries include sequencing DNA from extinct humans, turning stem cells into egg cells and landing Curiosity on Mars

From landing the Curiosity rover on Mars after a 350m-mile journey, to the discovery of the world's most wanted sub-atomic particle, the top 10 scientific achievements of 2012 have been nominated by the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, giving a snapshot of the march of human knowledge in genetics, physics, cosmology, medicine and nanoscience.

The discovery of the Higgs boson by physicists using the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland was named breakthrough of the year by Science magazine, with runners-up including the pin-sharp DNA sequencing of a Siberian cave girl who lived 50,000 years ago and a delicate brain implant in a Pennsylvania woman paralysed from the neck down that allowed her to use the power of thought to manipulate a robotic arm to grasp a bottle and take a sip of coffee.

Not surprising, but sad

Smoking Gun on Sexism?

But a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers evidence of bias among scientists -- male and female scientists alike -- against female students. The study was based on evaluations by scientists of hypothetical student applications for a lab manager position, with the application materials identical in every way, except that half of the pool received applications with a male name and the other half received applications with a female name. The faculty members surveyed -- 127 professors in biology, chemistry or physics -- were told that their analyses of the applications would be used to help the students. And they were asked to evaluate the students' competence and "hireability" and to consider how large a salary they would recommend and how much mentoring they would offer the student if hired.

The scientists evaluating these applications (which were identical in every way except the gender of the "submitter") rated the male student more competent, more likely to be hired, deserving of a better salary, and worth spending more time mentoring. The gaps were significant.

Female scientists were as likely as male scientists to evaluate the students this way. For instance, the scientists were asked to rate the students' competence on a 5-point scale. Male faculty rated the male student 4.01 and the female student 3.33. Female scientists rated the male student 4.10 and the female student 3.32. On salary, the gaps were also notable. The average salary suggested by male scientists for the male student was $30,520; for the female student, it was $27,111. Female scientists recommended, on average, a salary of $29,333 for the male student and $25,000 for the female student.

Click on the link above ('a new study') to read the paper itself.

When I was a kid

There was a young girl I met at church one Sunday. She was a classmate of mine, but she'd been absent a lot and I'd never really gotten to know her. By that Wednesday she was dead, bleeding as a consequence of the leukaemia she'd been fighting with the help of St Jude's Hospital in Memphis. She was my about my age--9 years old.

It was the first time I'd heard of leukaemia, and the very first time it really hit me that little kids get sick and die. It was a profound kind of thing, the sort of thing that hits you in the gut and changes your outlook bit by bit.

These days, thanks to researchers and clinicians at places like St Jude's and others, childhood leukaemia is much more survivable than it was then. But it--or for that matter, any form of cancer--can still be a devastating disease for anyone, child or adult.

So I found this story of interest:

In Treatment for Leukemia, Glimpses of the Future

What is important, medical researchers say, is the genes that drive a cancer, not the tissue or organ — liver or brain, bone marrow, blood or colon — where the cancer originates.

One woman’s breast cancer may have different genetic drivers from another woman’s and, in fact, may have more in common with prostate cancer in a man or another patient’s lung cancer.

Under this new approach, researchers expect that treatment will be tailored to an individual tumor’s mutations, with drugs, eventually, that hit several key aberrant genes at once. The cocktails of medicines would be analogous to H.I.V. treatment, which uses several different drugs at once to strike the virus in a number of critical areas.

In 1976 this would sound like science fiction, up there with the flying cars. Tailoring medicine to your genes? And now it's achieving reality. It amazes me what scientific breakthroughs have come about in my lifetime. It really is exciting to watch. This is a good time to live in, I believe. I don't have utter faith in science, by any means. It's a double-edged sword. But with every discovery we get closer to understanding how things work, and that's great, but also we can apply it to real-life situations make a difference on a smaller, yet equally important scale, or could save greater numbers or whole species.

I started out a science geek

I took college-level chemistry in high school, including organic (over the summer). I came three points short in by-passing the first two semesters of college chemistry, plus lab, and started out my college career in a dual biology and sociology major, interested in oecology and how people interact with their environment.

I had soaked up all that chemistry, physics, biology, and even had survived calculus, when I realised I was terribly burnt out on science. Then my animal biology lab teacher chloroformed a white rat we'd been playing with all semester in front of me and dissected it.

The next semester, I switched to history and sociology. I'm not saying history was easier--it's more than memorising dates, you know, but it was less intense, less full of ups and downs. And I found it much more interesting than I did the practice of science, which when you get down to it can be tedious, repetitive, and really, with the burn out I'd lost the spark I'd had for it. Instead, I threw myself into studying people--their history, their languages, art, etc. I went on to get a degree in history, sociology, and honours (a Great Books programme), went back and added a classical civilisation major and a Judaic studies minor, and then spent years in the ancient and mediaeval history graduate programme. Granted, I'm not working in that, I'm working as a librarian, which benefits from all sorts of backgrounds. :)

I do still love science--much like I love technology--but I prefer to be an armchair scientist, rather than making it my life's work. But I did find this interesting:

Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard)

Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students, who typically have the strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are included, according to new data from the University of California at Los Angeles. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors.

For educators, the big question is how to keep the momentum being built in the lower grades from dissipating once the students get to college.

I am a little wary of these sorts of stories, especially when they seem to originate from FOXNews

So this essay rather said what I thought about the matter:
The Giant, Prehistoric Squid That Ate Common Sense

We have a serious problem with science journalism. A big one, in fact, and today that problem takes the form of a giant, prehistoric squid with tentacles so formidable that it has sucked the brains right out of staff writers’ heads.

While making the rounds among a few California museums late last month, I kept hearing rumors of a bombastic, super-hyped presentation due to be presented at this year’s Geological Society of America meeting in Minneapolis. The scuttlebutt was that someone was going to give a talk about a super-intelligent, predatory squid which fed on huge ichthyosaurs during the Triassic. Fascinating, if true, but the reason that all the paleontologists I met were chuckling was because there was not a shred of actual evidence to back up the claims. Apparently, whoever was set to give the talk had apparently stayed up late watching It Came From Beneath the Sea too many times.

Now the talk has officially been given and the scant details of the proposition have been oozed out into the newswires by way of a press release. Let me be clear — there is no paper yet or anything specific for those not in attendance at GSA to look at. This fact will be key to the media nonsense which has been swirling around the web today.

Here's the FOXNews story for comparison: Lair of Ancient 'Kraken' Sea Monster Possibly Discovered

Something I should consider with my sleep in the evening-get up-sleep some more schedule

Fragmented sleep 'harms memory'

Broken sleep affects the ability to build memories, a study of mice suggests.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science findings could help explain memory problems linked to conditions including Alzheimer's and sleep apnoea.

The Stanford University found disrupting sleep made it harder for the animals to recognise familiar objects.

A UK sleep expert said the brain used deep sleep to evaluate the day's events and decide what to keep.

This study looked at sleep that was fragmented, but not shorter or less intense than normal for the mice.

It used a technique called optogenetics, where specific cells are genetically engineered so they can be controlled by light.

They targeted a type of brain cell that plays a key role in switching between the states of being asleep and being awake.

Optogenetics sounds very interesting.

:D Now, that's a nefarious evil plan for mind control

A psychoactive drug that’s spread through unprotected sex with men

You're a nefarious supervillian and you want to transform this city into a hive of mind-controlled minions. But you also need the element of surprise. Two new scientific studies offer a possible solution. You can implant behavior-changing proteins in sperm, creating a sexually-transmitted form of mind control.

Let's not bother with why you would want to do this. Maybe you're conquering Orgyopolis, or you only want minions who are willing to have sex with your sperm donors.

The point is, scientists are working on research that could one day make your evil plan possible.

It's amazing either country made it into space

Do a third of Russians believe the sun spins around Earth?: Survey points to low science literacy ... but Americans aren't brilliant, either

Can you determine the truth value of these statements correctly?

• The Earth goes around the sun.
  
• All radioactivity is man-made.
  
• Humans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs.

I don't know how they were worded in the surveys, but of course the answers are True, False, and False.

Trouble is:

Russians surveyed--
32% said Earth was the centre of the solar system.
55% said that all radioactivity is human-made.
29% said the first humans lived when dinosaurs were on Earth.

Americans (in different but similar surveys)--
72% said Earth goes around the sun.
63% knew there was radiation that was not man-made.
59% said dinosaurs and humans did not live at the same time.

That leaves a lot of people who don't know squat about basic science in both countries.

Now that's a science project

8-Year-Olds Publish Scientific Bee Study

A group of British schoolchildren may be the youngest scientists ever to have their work published in a peer-reviewed journal. In a new paper in Biology Letters, 25 8- to 10-year-old children from Blackawton Primary School report that buff-tailed bumblebees can learn to recognize nourishing flowers based on colors and patterns.

“We discovered that bumblebees can use a combination of colour and spatial relationships in deciding which colour of flower to forage from,” the students wrote in the paper’s abstract. “We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before.”