MOSCOW, July 23 --

Cellestis is pleased to introduce BioChemMack (Moscow, Russia) as its newly
appointed commercial partner for distribution of the tuberculosis blood test,
QuantiFERON(R)-TB Gold In-Tube (QFT(TM)), in Russia.

Founded in 1989, BioChemMack JSC (BCM) was one of the first joint venture
companies in the former USSR and is now privately owned with more than 50
employees. Originally focused on enzyme immunoassay kits, BCM has expanded to
become one of the largest distributors of new diagnostic equipment in Russia.

As antibiotic resistances continue evolve in a smaller world they become a more difficult problem to eradicate.

Acquisition of mutations is one of the ways by which bacteria become resistant to antibiotics. But this comes with a cost: although crucial for bacteria survival in a medium with antibiotics, in its absence bacteria growth rate is reduced. Although it is not possible to impaired bacteria to evolve and adapt to the environment, it is possible to choose the type of selective pressure (antibiotics) to administrate and, in this way, alter the course of evolution to our favor.

A new study shows the importance of knowing the costs of multi-resistance to find the best antibiotic combinations - the ones that carry more costs to the bacteria. 

Researchers who make generalizations about the effects of domestication and dog-wolf differences in the utilization of human visual signals, take note; a new study says dog breeds selected to work in visual contact with humans, such as sheep dogs and gun dogs, are better able to comprehend a pointing gesture than those breeds that usually work without direct supervision.

In a series of tests, Márta Gácsi from Eötvös University, Hungary worked with a team of researchers to examine the performance of different breeds of dogs in making sense of the human pointing gesture.

Men are adopting some modern attitudes but in some ways they are still the same.  According to a new study on the current thoughts and attitudes of men in the UK, 89% of men surveyed thought that any girl they date should have marriage potential and 38% thought anyone they date shouldn’t have had more than 5 former lovers.

How very Victorian.   No question addressed how many former lovers men should have.   Let's assume it's 5X, as nature intended.

68% would not punch their boss in the face, even if they could get away with it, but only 50% would punch a colleague if they had the same opportunity.  Which is positively civilized.

Pancakes make you happy.  Science knows that now.     For decades, social scientists have  been searching for a way to measure happiness without any success.

Surveys provide some useful information but people misreport and misremember their feelings when confronted by aguy with the clipboard. Ditto for studies where volunteers call in their feelings.  Generally speaking, people get squirrely when they know they're being studied.

But Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth, a mathematician and computer scientist working in the Advanced Computing Center at the University of Vermont, say they have created a remote-sensing mechanism that can record how millions of people around the world are feeling on any particular day — without their knowing it.

Humans, bah.  Multimodal, egg-headed, tool-using, bipedal, opposing-thumbed existence is so 2008.   Ants are where it's at, to the delight of neo-rationalists everywhere (and Edward O. Wilson too).

They can accomplish tasks a lot more rationally than humans, says a Arizona State University and Princeton University study in Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences.

This is not a case of overall smartness.   Humans and other animals simply often make irrational choices when faced with very challenging decisions, note Stephen Pratt and Susan Edwards.

The main stream media (“MSM”)[1] frequently treat us to dramatic stories of “scientific controversies” supposedly playing themselves out before our eyes. However, while such stories might make for exciting reading, they are seldom especially informative as regards to scientific inquiry itself.

The reasons for this are not hard to find: any reasoned inquiry requires patience, discipline, depth and commitment, none of which readily express themselves in 15 second sound bytes or breathless “he said/she said” paragraphs that rush ahead of the facts in the name of “balance.”

A new paper on the ArXiV caught my attention this evening for several reasons. First of all, because two of its five authors (J.Ellis, J.R.Espinosa, G.F.Giudice, A.Hoecker, and A.Riotto) are (or have been) my colleagues in Padova University; second, because the title is quite catchy; third, because indeed the results it presents are valuable food for thought.

Talk to any molecular biologist, and you'll find that most of them feel that there is something that we're missing when we analyze complex biological systems. These systems are often too difficult to reason about verbally in any sort of detailed or rigorous way. So we build mathematical models, sometimes going to great effort to perform very precise measurements so that we can properly parameterize our models.

The Voynich Manuscript part 4 : Not So Mysterious ?

The Voynich manuscript was written in an as yet unreadable script.  It is named after Wilfrid Voynich, who acquired it as a dealer in 1912 from the library of Villa Mondragone, a Jesuit college in Frascati, Italy.  It is now in the care of Yale Library.

In my previous articles on Yale Library's Beinebecke MS 408 I focused on its background.  I am now going to discuss some basic possibilities about its unusual script.  I am still working on an attempt to transcribe the text into modern English.  If I succeed, my readers here at scientificblogging will be the first to know.