Evolution has no moral compass.  We all know that.  And it has no guiding hand.  For that reason, says Christian de Duve, professor emeritus at the Catholic University of Louvain and Nobel laureate (Medicine or Physiology 1974), we may be doomed.

And to get his point across to all sides, he uses an Original Sin metaphor.   

Up to 12 percent of Americans may get Alzheimer's disease, current statistics say.  In the quest to prevent Alzheimer's, or at least make it manageable like diabetes, a group of researchers are working on a nasally-delivered vaccine that promises to protect against Alzheimer's.  Bonus: It may help prevent strokes also.

The new vaccine repairs vascular damage in the brain by using the body's own immune system and, in addition to its prophylactic effect, it can work even when Alzheimer's symptoms are already present, according to the paper in Neurobiology of Aging.

SKIPTON, England, March 1, 2011 - Grotty old beds could be behind a growing epidemic of 'toxic sleep'. 

 A new Sleep Council survey just in time for National Bed Month shows nearly half of us are getting just six hours sleep or less a night. And an alarming four out of five people complain of disturbed or inadequate - 'toxic' - sleep. 

The survey was conducted online by Pollab Ltd between January 26 - 27 2011. 1,030 UK adults (aged 16+) were questioned, the sample being broadly representative of the UK population and demographically broken down by age, gender, region and marital status.

News story on a traveler with measles moving around the US: "More than 10 million people are infected with measles worldwide each year,and the disease is the leading cause of vaccine-preventable deaths in small children. Outbreaks are more common in Europe than in the United States, and most U.S. cases come from transatlantic travelers. U.S. law requires that any cases of measles be reported to public health authorities.

One of the subtleties of the human condition is that if you like or support someone or something, you can understand the nuances of what words mean differently than if you do not.   If you are a fan of WikiLeaks, for example, the ends justify the means and how they obtain information is unimportant whereas if you are a fan of the climate researchers behind the so-called ClimateGate, the fact that the emails about them were stolen is most important.    And if those researchers are cleared of scientific misconduct you say they are cleared.

George Best - An Elizabethan Climate Scientist

whosoeuer could finde out in what proportion the Angle of the Sunne beames heateth, and what encrease the Sunnes continuance doeth adde thereunto, it might expresly be set downe, what force of heat and cold is in all regions.
George Best, written between 1578 and 1584.

Image courtesy NASA: http://researchpark.arc.nasa.gov/...

People are sometimes surprised to hear that I am both a research scientist and an artist, but I see them as quite similar in purpose, only different medium. They both involve imagination, visualization, and communication of those ideas in a way that makes it accessible and interesting for an intended audience. For me, they go hand-in-hand.


The cover of this year's Open Laboratory 2010, designed by myself, Andrea Kuszewski.

Mnookin's site

Offit's site    



Vaccine Epidemic's site

When I was a lad, we were taught that carbon had two allotropes, graphite and diamond.  Although they’re both covalently connected, in neither of these is there anything that one would regard as a ‘molecule’. 

Among environmental activists and their supporters, the use of genetic modification is a bad thing.   Obviously, tomatoes would be the size of our thumbs if our ancestors did not genetically modify plants so research continues.   A group of researchers has announced that plants have for the first time been cloned as seeds, a major step toward making hybrid crop plants that can retain favorable traits from generation to generation - something to which even the most anti-science people can object.