What constitutes racism?
If you have a pool of applicants for a research grant and applications with good scores were likely to be funded, regardless of race or ethnicity, can there be racism?
A recent survey of NIH R01 applications found that applications from black investigators were 13.2 % less likely to be awarded than whites while Asian investigators were 3.9 % less likely to have their work funded. This correlates to the number of applicants as well; blacks are only 1.4% of total applications while Asians are 16.2% and whites are almost 70%.
Our solar system, with planets over a range of sizes and moving in near-circular paths, seems to be unusual, according to a model in t Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society which finds that forming planetary systems may be knocked around by crashes with nearby clumps of material, leading to systems where planets have highly inclined orbits and where the smaller - and potentially habitable - worlds are thrown out completely.
Researchers have developed an inexpensive way to grade the ethanol potential of perennial grasses at the biorefinery's loading dock - the first use of near-infrared sensing (NIRS) to measure 20 components in switchgrass biomass that determine its potential value to biorefiners. These components include cell wall sugars, soluble sugars and lignin. With this information, 13 traits can be determined, including the efficiency of the conversion from sugars to ethanol.
This is the first use of NIRS to predict maximum and actual ethanol yields of grasses from a basic conversion process. This capability already exists for corn grain using NIRS.
On one of my recent safari’s through the internet jungle, I came across a remarkable little creature. It’s a small (maximum diameter about 4.5 millimeters) bell-shaped jellyfish, with a number of tentacles ranging from 8 in young specimens to 90 in adult ones.
It’s name is Turritopsis nutricula (see figure 1), and it can actually age backwards. A cnidarian Benjamin Button, as it were.
Figure 1: The immortal jellyfish, T. nutricula.
(Source: zmescience)
Look, we all know smoking is bad for you by now. We don't need to spend billions of dollars telling people that but an entire industry has been built around getting people to stop, and it is primarily funded by penalties on tobacco companies and taxes. It's a truly parasitic relationship but it isn't going anywhere and anti-smoking groups need smokers to stay in business. Apparently so do some researchers.
For this instance of my "Guess the plot" series I wish to go back to the basics. So I picked a graph which allows me to illustrate a general concept, something about particle physics (but we could say physics in general, and actually extending to other exact sciences) which is a source of endless awe for me: the fact that some functions exist, in the infinite-dimensional space of all real functions of a real variable, which describe some specific feature of our world.
As health care costs continue to rise and more people want more services for less money, it will be important that doctors engage in evidence-based medicine.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have determined that the majority of primary care providers continue to recommend annual cervical cancer screening, though cervical cancer screening guidelines recommend a combination of a Papanicolaou test and an HPV test, known as an HPV co-test, for women 30 years of age and older.
Five years into the Science 2.0 experiment I can tell you down to the eyeball how many people are involved in the communication pillar of it - but in the collaboration realm, it's not so easy.
Science 2.0 fave Heather A. Piwowar from the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Pitt recently gave it a shot, and the answer was...it's unknown.
Cancer, diabetes, stroke and transplant patients can all get benefit from one common thing; frog skin.
An international research project is collecting proteins from our amphibian friends (no frogs were harmed in the writing of this article or in the research) and adding to a growing bank of biological data needed to build up our understanding of the naturally occurring medicines in frogs.
They have already found that the peptides (mini-proteins) collected from the Waxy Monkey Frog and the Giant Firebellied Toad can be used in a controlled and targeted way to regulate 'angiogenesis', the process by which blood vessels grow in the body.
University of Alberta researcher David Bressler has an idea for the future of recycling.
Using throwaway parts of beef carcasses that were sidelined from the value-added production process after Mad-cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE) damaged the Canadian beef industry in 2003, Bressler has collaborated with industry, government and other researchers to forge cattle proteins into heavy-duty plastics that could soon be used in everything from car parts to CD cases.
