"Chagas Disease: “The New HIV/AIDS of the Americas”" screams the headline of an editorial in the open access journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, written primarily by two principal investigators of a vaccine against Chagas disease - and it has resounded with a thud among the actual people they think they are helping.
Almost exactly a year ago, I made a medium storm in the water glass by publishing my exchange with what I ironically called the "Future King of Physics". I then asked Perimeter Institute in Canada, Oxford University, and FQXi, to distance themselves from Joy Christian instead of any further supporting his pseudoscience.
Diagnostic tools are getting small, small enough to fit in a person's pocket, and one huge benefit for medical researchers would be a way to easily move and even mix small samples of a liquid.
A newly patented surface moves drops along certain paths - all it takes is a shake.
Georgy Nikolaevich Flerov (1913-1990) is the father of the superheavy element production in the USSR (now Russia). Under his guidance scientists at the Flerov Nuclear Institute in Dubna were successful in synthesizing a significant number of heavy elements, non-existing in nature.
Space is an extremely hostile environment. You knew that, though no one wants to think about exploding instantly as their blood boils without an atmosphere (
or it does not - like
how airplanes fly,
this seems to still be a debate). Most planets aren't all that much better.
Honduras is now a permanent shark sanctuary so any shark fins found are illegal - the International Union for Conservation of Nature says that 30 percent of all shark populations around the world are threatened or near threatened with extinction.
The remains of newborn twin girls have been found in the archaeological site of Sant Miquel d'Olèrdola in Catalonia and it is expected that they belong to two girls between 38 and 40 weeks of gestation, who were buried at the same time in the same grave with their legs entwined.
The remains date between the middle of the 4th century B.C. to the beginning of the 2nd century B.C. and are the first bone remains of twins to be recorded in the Iberian peninsula.
If you think about it rationally, sex may be fun but it's too much work and, from a reproduction standpoint, the payoff is uncertain. Scientists have speculated for a long time on why all living things don't simply make like amoebas and split.
Scientists believe that sexual reproduction offers two big advantages: It can sweep bad mutations out of the gene pool more quickly. Also, by shuffling parents' genetic material each generation, it increases the likelihood that new genetic combinations will arise that help organisms adapt to their environment.
I have set out to write about "Naturality" for this column three times since the beginning of 2012 and each time I have abandoned the article. It's a complex topic that easily gets away from me. I have been measuring Naturality in search engine results for several years now. Some years ago I devised a simple formula to help me explain Naturality to people:
1 = Ny + Ty + Oy
The fair trade movement is in its seventh decade but has an internal problem. Fair trade, as a concept, sought originally to make sure small people got a fair deal - a Mennonite visiting Puerto Rico saw the poverty levels of people there and decided to help them make more money, rather than advocating to give them government handouts (I know, I know, zany religious types).
