Most years, we generally don't worry about the flu (unless we're paid to worry about it, or we belong to an especially susceptible population). Yet some years, like this one, threats of a pandemic flu virus make it on everyone's radar screen. So exactly what is it that makes a flu virus reach pandemic proportions?

A group of researchers at the US Centers for Disease Control, Mt. Sinai and Harvard recently used engineered versions of the disastrous 1918 flu virus (don't try this at home!) to learn just what makes a flu virus go global.

Just why do we have a space station, anyway? That's a question of relevance, because it turns out we might not have one after 2015. The International Space Science Station (ISS) is a football-field sized structure able to support six people 220 miles above us. It is a symbol of international cooperation, a marvel of technology, a new site for tourism and, to some, a project to be terminated in 2015.

What we've gotten from it? Some intangibles, some useful stuff.

• advancing our space capability



• increasing our limits on how long people can live in orbit



• keeping nuclear scientists from going rogue after the breakup of the Soviet Union



• research that benefits Earth

Men suffer noise-induced hearing loss more than women, it seems.   Guys just rock out more, you might think.  Better to burn out than fade away, and all that.  

But it's primarily married white guys who can't turn the volume down, which means our families will have the next 70 years of repeating everything twice, and louder, because, let's face it, guys with rock star fantasies won't wear hearing aids.  What's to be done?

Noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) is a preventable though increasingly prevalent hearing disorder that results from exposure to high-intensity sound, especially over a long period of time.   Thanks, iPod.  Now turn down the Journey, gentlemen.  If you haven't stopped believin' by now, you never will.

In the last article we considered the formation of choices as providing a set of predetermined responses to various situations.  It is this phase of data gathering and assessment that sets the groundwork for our moral responsibility.

Specifically it is erroneous to consider that choices are evaluated and determined solely at the point of action, but rather, default states may well be set within the brain based on our training and indoctrination.  It is these default states that represent the possibility of choices that we can base a decision on.

Everyone's heard of open heart surgery but closed heart surgery could one day be just as ubiquitous, according to research from the Universities of Michigan and Minnesota in the FASEB Journal.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, heart failure is a condition where the heart cannot pump enough blood and oxygen to meet the needs of other body organs. Approximately 5 million people in the United States have heart failure, about 550,000 new cases are diagnosed each year, and more than 287,000 people in the United States die each year of heart failure. The most common causes of heart failure are coronary artery disease, hypertension or high blood pressure, and diabetes.

You've heard of the Mercury 7 astronauts; they became the backbone of the NASA program and inspiration to an entire generation of young people.   But you may not have known there were also a Mercury 13 - and they were women.

In the early years of the space race two men sought to test a scientifically simple yet culturally complicated theory - that women might be better suited for space travel than men.

In 1960 a woman in space instead of a man was a revolutionary idea: 75% of American women did not work outside the home and females were banned from military flight service.   Wives were required to have their husband's permission to take out a bank loan, buy property, or purchase large household goods such as a refrigerator.

'Blue haze' is a natural occurrence over heavily forested areas around the world but natural does not always mean good.  Still, while blue haze may be formed by natural emissions of chemicals, human activities can worsen it to the point of affecting the world's weather and even cause potential climate problems, according to a new study.

When you walk through a forest or even a large grassy area, it's not uncommon to be able to smell the plants around you, such as pine trees or other vegetation. That smell is nature's way of naturally making organic gases produced by the plants themselves, often millions of tons per day.

It seems like common sense that too much of even good things can be bad.  Everyone has heard about the damage that reactive oxygen species (ROS) – aka free radicals – can do to our bodies by now and the sales pitches for antioxidant vitamins, skin creams or "superfoods" that can stop them - so many that we will shut off comments for this article because it will be all spam.

There is ample scientific evidence that chronic ROS production within cells can contribute to human diseases, including insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes but a new report in Cell Metabolism, says that low levels of ROS – and hydrogen peroxide in particular - might actually protect us from diabetes, by improving our ability to respond to insulin signals. 

Recent correspondence directed me to the fact that there is a Philosophy section in Scientific Blogging. This is something I have kept away from, since my view of the subject follows the Pooh-Goethe paradigm [1]. However, I have just read In The Beginning - A Rough Guide To A Physicalist View Of Everything which introduced the subject of metaphysics. Now it may be customary to think that metaphysics is “that which lies beyond physics”, so the more we get our physics right, the better the metaphysics. But then Darwin had a different perspective. In his Notebook M (1838) he wrote

To test whether my belief that homeopathy is not an evidence-based rational system of medicine is reasonable or just prejudice on my part, I did a quick experiment using Google Scholar. (This was done Jan 17, 2008)

A "layman's meta-analysis" of sorts. Not supremely scientific alas (although perhaps somewhat reminiscent of a GCSE science project ), but the best I could do early in the morning with only vending-machine coffee to keep my brain from sleep ;-)