biology

I knew there was a reason why I like bioethicist Art Caplan. Leave it to him not to be afraid not only to wander a bit afield of medicine than usual but also to call it as he sees it, mainly his argument for why Expelled! and its claim that "Darwinism" led directly to the Holocaust is not only historically incorrect but a form of Holocaust denial. I don't quite agree with him, but he makes a compelling argument: The movie seeks to explain why, as a matter of freedom of speech, intelligent design should be taught in America's science classrooms and presented in America's publicly funded…

In our previous post we set the stage for discussing the results of a significant new paper by Imai et al. and colleagues on the mechanism of lung damage from diverse pathogens, including SARS, bird flu H5N1, 1918 H1N1 flu, inhalational anthrax and Monkeypox. If this work is verified it is a major step forward in our understanding of how the devastating consequences of Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) and Acute Lung Injury (ALI) come about and may well provide clues about how to treat what is still an essentially untreatable and catastrophic medical condition. There are two main…

The cells of your body don't just sit there, unmindful of what is going on around them. They have to respond to things, even cooperate with other cells to get things done for the common good. Humans do the same thing. We've developed a system of signaling to each other using an intricate vocal system, a complex grammar, ears, eyes and smell detecting systems. It's a very complicated package with a lot of moving parts. It's not so surprising, then, that cells also have complex signaling systems with a lot of parts that they use to respond to their environment. Just as we sometimes make a…

A follow up to the scientists & drugs topic, Wired's current issue is devoted to cranking up your intelligence. Most of the advice is kind of kooky, but there is a neat chart of mind-amping drugs if you are so inclined.

Seeing the sun set across Pinnacles National Monument, while the full moon rises out past the San Andreas fault (below the fold) is pretty awesome. It would've been nice to see some condors, too. Though the horned lizard was pretty excellent.

Rosalind Franklin's X-ray diffraction photograph of DNA, 1953 London's Natural History Museum photo by Mo at Neurophilosophy

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive pollute." I know it doesn't rhyme. But the tangled web is real: Songbirds feeding near the contaminated South River are showing high levels of mercury, even though they aren't eating food from the river itself, according to a paper published by William and Mary researchers in the journal Science. Lead author Dan Cristol said his paper has wide-ranging international environmental implications. Mercury is one of the world's most troublesome pollutants, especially in water. The South River, a major tributary of Virginia's…

Vitamin D Important In Brain Development And Function: McCann & Ames point out that evidence for vitamin D's involvement in brain function includes the wide distribution of vitamin D receptors throughout the brain. They also discuss vitamin D's ability to affect proteins in the brain known to be directly involved in learning and memory, motor control, and possibly even maternal and social behavior. The review also discusses studies in both humans and animals that present suggestive though not definitive evidence of cognitive or behavioral consequences of vitamin D inadequacy. The authors…

There's an epidemic of a viral disease in Florida, although you wouldn't know it unless you were a vegetable or a farmer: In recent years, the number of whitefly-transmitted viruses in cucurbit fields, home to crops like cucumbers, squashes, pumpkins, melons and watermelons, has increased to almost epidemic proportions in Florida. Researchers led by plant pathologists Scott Adkins and Bill Turechek at the ARS Subtropical Plant Pathology Research Unit in Fort Pierce, Fla., are dealing with a "triple threat" to cucurbits: three major viruses, all transmitted by silverleaf whitefly, Bemisia…

When someone asks the question "why are veins blue?" a likely response is that they're blue because the blood in veins is deoxygenated. While it's true that venous blood vessels carry a lower concentration of oxygen than their arterial counterparts, this isn't the reason for their blue appearance in your skin. Still, when someone invariably responds to the veins-are-blue-because-they're-deoxygenated argument with the observation that "I've never seen blue blood before" one might then hear the slightly more sophisticated-sounding but increasingly far-fetched claim that we don't ever observe…

As you may know, Ben Stein's execrable crapfest of a movie, Expelled!: No Intelligence Allowed, slimes its way into theatres on Friday. From my perspective, the biggest, most vile lie pushed by Ben Stein and produce Mark Mathis is that it's a direct line from their hated "Darwinism" to the Holocaust, as I've pointed out twice before, but another major theme of the movie is that the poor, "truth-seeking" intelligent design creationists are ruthlessly "expelled" by those (pick one or more) atheistic/Stalinist/Nazi Darwinists. Fortunately, there is a resource to counter Ben Stein's lies (and,…

My backyard is currently a hive of activity. It’s just past 3pm here in Tempe and the temperature is about 96 degrees. As a break from grading, I’m sitting on my back patio watching the avian world unfold. A splendid male Great-tailed Grackle (Quicalus mexicanus) has been noisily courting two females on the lawn and seems to have achieved two matings. One of the three female Black-chinned Hummingbirds (Archilochus alexandri) we have nesting in our trees has taken possession of our feeder (and the nearby flowering agave) and is very active in defending it from all comers - including a male…

Last Wednesday, Nature released the results of an informal survey about cognitive enhancers—drugs known to improve concentration and counteract fatigue. Twenty percent of the 1,400 international respondents said they had used cognitive enhancers (such as Ritalin and beta blockers) for non-medical reasons to stimulate their focus, concentration or memory. Eighty percent thought that healthy adults should have the option of taking these drugs if desired. This week, we're polling our own readers: Should healthy adults have the option of taking cognitive-enhancing drugs for non-medical reasons…

On Wednesday 2 April, British fringe researcher Rupert Sheldrake was stabbed in the leg by a man showing symptoms of severe mental illness. The wound was serious but not fatal. The attacker struck shortly after Sheldrake had called a break in his presentation to the 10th International Conference on Science and Consciousness in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In my opinion, the paranormal ideas for which Sheldrake is known are simply nuts. But I don't think he would be likely to attack anybody with a knife, and he certainly doesn't deserve such treatment himself. Get well soon, Dr. Sheldrake! I much…

Harold Varmus is one of the most high profile advocates of open access to biomedical research. As one of the cofounders of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), he has played an important role in making published results freely available to all. And he's a Nobel Laureate, which ain't too shaby either. Varmus was interviewed by Ira Flatow for NPR's Science Friday program about the NIH's new policy requiring that research publications presenting results funded by the NIH be deposited in PubMed Central (the NIH's free online archive of biomedical journal articles) within a year of publication.…

Well, I'm here in sunny San Diego and about to head on over to the convention center to check out the day's festivities and to make sure to check out a friend's poster this morning. (If anyone reading this is attending AACR, you might recognize me by the Plexiglass box full of multi-colored blinking lights and the bad attitude who will have a propensity to whip out a laptop and blog if he finds interesting science to blog about.) The flight sucked, as usual. I was stuck in the middle seat, and the guy on one side of me looked like a bodybuilder and was suitably wide. It occurred to me that…

I have professional colleagues who are dedicated birders but it has never interested me, and their interests are mainly independent of their lives as epidemiologists, toxicologists or whatever else they do at work. But the biosphere is truly interconnected in strange ways and sometimes what seems an unrelated realm intrudes itself front and center in a different context. Bird migration is a good example. How is bird flu spread? Is it human enabled movements of infected poultry or the rare bird trade? Or is it the "natural" movements of wild, migratory birds, the natural reservoir for the…

My birthday is mere months away, and Stephanie Metz's beautiful art would be a lovely gift for me or anyone else whose opinion you respect. I happen to think the teddy bear skulls are a bit twee, but this is badass: Yes, children, I said a dirty word, but no other word can accurately describe any skull that has been lovingly crafted out of felt. The posters showing embryos made out of felt would also make nice gifts.

New genomic research by Matthias Obst of the Department of Zoology at the University of Gothenburg, due to be published in Nature on 10 April, shows that the oldest extant phylum among Earth's animals is the ctenophores (Sw. kammaneter), not, as previously assumed, the sponges. Via Dagens Nyheter. [More blog entries about zoology, ctenophores, evolution; zoologi, kammaneter, evolution.]

Here's something cool. Norway spruce trees sprout from subterranean root systems, and though the actual trees come and go, the roots are extremely long-lived. In this they're actually a lot like mushrooms. New research by Leif Kullman at the University of UmeÃ¥ is just being reported on by the media. His team has studied spruce trees on the treeline of Mount Härjehogna in Dalecarlia, central Sweden, and found no standing trees older than 600 years when wood samples were dated. But below ground, the living roots of three trees gave radiocarbon dates at 5,000, 6,000 and 8,000 years BP! The…