Welcome to the month of May! The time of Beltane and Walpurgis Night, flowers and maypoles and springtime dancing.
Want a May Basket? Well, um, how about a nice gall instead? Dave Hubble zooms in with some exquisite photos and shows us just what a gift a gall can be to the inquisitive mind.
Scientists have identified a biochemical abnormality behind the potentially fatal neurodegenerative Machado-Joseph disease (MJD) and, using several models of the disease, were able to reverse the problem in what may be a crucial step towards a cure for humans. Currently, the disease is incurable and the patients’ increasing neurodegeneration cannot be stopped.
John Hunter had a gift for dissection. As a child he was an unexceptional student. At age 20, he journeyed to London in the midst of Britain's rise as a scientific power to assist at his brother's anatomy school. There he displayed a gift for finely dismantling the human body into its discrete parts.
Hunter went on to become a surgeon, at the time a vocation that put him on the same social footing as shoemakers or metal smiths. With little modern medical knowledge to guide them through the inner workings of their patients, surgeons were tradesmen. Hunter changed that.
Schrödinger’s cat is in a quantum superposition of two states, namely |Dead> and |Alive>. If we open the box and find the cat dead, where is the living one? You all know the answer: In the ‘parallel universe’ where I pull the cat out alive. Let me add a twist that only a true cat hater can come up with.
Arctic Ice May 2011The great thing about the scientific method is that we can figure out what will happen if we do something before we do it. Scientists figured out long ago that burning fossil fuels and putting CO2 into the atmosphere at a great rate would affect the planet's climate systems. Which it has. One of the predictions about the effect of dumping CO2 into the atmosphere was that the Arctic would be affected most. Which it has been. Scientists predicted an Arctic acceleration or amplification: a process where positive feedbacks become ever stronger with ever less Arctic ice. Ice loss is accelerating.
In 2008, when concerns about the birth place of future nominee and then campaign winner Barack Obama first surfaced, most felt like he should just show a birth certificate. He didn't want to 'dignify' it then, to a point where it has dogged him for years
and finally he showed the document, laying the issue to rest for all but the kookiest on the right.
Too many older adults are taking "excessive" doses of drugs for thyroid problems and that has been linked to an increased risk of fractures, according to a new study. The study raises concern that treatment targets may need to be modified in the elderly.
What helps can sometimes hurt.
ERBB4, a gene known to be important in cardiac development, has been associated with congenital heart malformations that result in obstruction of the left ventricular outflow tract.
Left ventricular outflow tract (LVOT) malformations, including aortic valve stenosis, coarctation of the aorta, hypoplastic left heart syndrome, Shone complex and interrupted aortic arch type A, are responsible for a major portion of childhood death from congenital heart malformations. Yet it is often unclear how these defects develop.
Obese mothers are putting babies at risk for iron deficiency, which could affect infant brain development, according to research presented today at the Pediatric Academic Societies annual meeting in Denver.
In non-pregnant adults, obesity-related inflammation hinders the transport of iron through the intestine, increasing the risk of iron deficiency anemia. When a woman is pregnant, iron is transferred through the intestine to the placenta, but it is not known how maternal obesity affects newborn iron status. Fetal iron status is important because 50 percent of the iron needed for infant growth is obtained before birth.
A few Science 2.0 readers may recall that I tried out some ideas for a book here in 2009, and the immediate feedback was encouraging and helpful. The book is called
First Life and is about to be published by UCPress. (One of my colleagues mentioned that advance copies are already available from Amazon.com.) I thought it might be interesting to say a bit more about how a book can emerge from the chaos of daily life, and how the effort has affected what I am doing now.
