Stephen Colbert Interviews Neil deGrasse Tyson: Worth watching!!!
HEALTH (BODY SYSTEMS)
Antibiotics Weren't Used to Cure These Patients. Fecal Bacteria Were. NYTIMES.
In a small study, doctors used so-called fecal transplants to treat a serious gut infection in patients. The transplants, from healthy donors, were as effective as antibiotics.
4. Trillions Upon Trillions of Viruses Fall From the Sky Each Day. Source. NYTIMES
High in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Spain, an international team of researchers set out four buckets to gather a shower of viruses falling from the sky. “Viruses modulate the function and evolution of all living things,” scientists wrote last year. “But to what extent remains a mystery.”
Government officials, drug companies and medical experts, faced with outbreaks of antibiotic-resistant “superbugs,” are pushing to speed up the approval of new antibiotics, a move that is raising safety concerns among some critics.
2. Unlocking the Secrets of the Microbiome. NYTimes. Read about the bacterial biome inhabiting our bodies!!
Modern technology is making it possible for medical scientists to analyze inhabitants of our innards that most people probably would rather not know about. But the resulting information could one day save your health or even your life.
3. Relax, You Don't Need to 'Eat Clean'. NYTIMES Opinion. TOK link!!!
We talk about food in the negative: What we shouldn’t eat, what we’ll regret later, what’s evil, dangerously tempting, unhealthy.
The effects are more insidious than any overindulgent amount of “bad food” can ever be. By fretting about food, we turn occasions for comfort and joy into sources of fear and anxiety. And when we avoid certain foods, we usually compensate by consuming too much of others.
CELL BIOLOGY
1. 'Henrietta Lacks': A Donor's Immortal Legacy. SOURCE: NPR News
In 1951, an African-American woman named Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with terminal cervical cancer. She was treated at Johns Hopkins University, where a doctor named George Gey snipped cells from her cervix without telling her. Gey discovered that Lacks' cells could not only be kept alive, but would also grow indefinitely.
2. For 3 Nobel Winners, A Molecular Mystery Solved. SOURCE: NY TIMES
Three Americans won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for discovering the machinery that regulates how cells transport major molecules in a cargo system that delivers them to the right place at the right time.
3. William Pollack Dies at 87; His Vaccine Saved Infants
William Pollack, a medical researcher, helped develop a vaccine for a blood disorder commonly called Rh disease.
GENETICS and GENETIC ENGINEERING
1. A Baby, Plaese. Blond, Freckles--Hold the Colic. Source: The Wall Street Journal
2. With Genetic Gift, 2 Monkeys Are Viewing a More Colorful World. Source: NY Times.
3. Examining Gene Therapy As Treatment For Blindness, Source: INTERVIEW from Science Friday from NPR News.
4. Gene Therapy Helps Blind Children See. Source: Science Now.
5. Human Cloning May Be Just Around the Corner. Source: NPR News
6. Are Genetically Modified Foods Safe to Eat. Source: NPR News. This is an interview (podcast)
7. E. U Clears Biotech Potato for Cultivation. Source: NY Times.
8. Monsanto's GMO Corn Linked To Organ Failure, Study Reveals. Source: Huffington's Post.
9. New Rule Allows Use of Partial DNA Matches. Source: NY TImes
10. So You're Extinct? Scientists Have Gleam in Eye. Source: NY Times
Until recently, the arrow of natural selection seemed to go only one way. A species could form, then it could flourish, then it could go extinct. And once it was extinct, it could not come back. Now, though, some scientists say they see a new path. "Maybe we can no longer delay death, but we can reverse it"
11. A Dream of Trees Aglow at Night. Source: NY Times
Hoping to give new meaning to the term “natural light,” a small group of biotechnology hobbyists and entrepreneurs has started a project to develop plants that glow, potentially leading the way for trees that can replace electric streetlamps and potted flowers luminous enough to read by.
12. Engineering the $325,000 in Vitro Burger. Source: NY Times
MAASTRICHT, the Netherlands — As a gastronomic delicacy, the five-ounce hamburger that Mark Post has painstakingly created here surely will not turn any heads. But Dr. Post is hoping that it will change some minds.
13. Ethics Questions Arise as Genetic Testing of Embryos Increases. Source: NY Times
Her first thought after she heard the news, after she screamed and made her mother and boyfriend leave the room, was that she would never have children. Amanda Baxley’s doctor had just told her, over a speakerphone in her psychiatrist’s office, that she had the gene for Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker disease, or GSS, which would inevitably lead to her slow and terrible death.
EVOLUTION
1. THE SEARCH OF GENES LEADS TO UNEXPECTED PLACES. Source NY times.
In the 1950s, the study of homology entered a new phase. Scientists began to discover similarities in the structure of proteins. Different species have different forms of hemoglobin, for example. Each form is adapted to a particular way of life, but all descended from one ancestral molecule.
2. HUMAN CULTURE, AN EVOLUTIONARY FORCE. Source NY Times
Genes enabling lactose tolerance, which probably resulted in more surviving offspring, were detected in cultures like the Kenyan shepherd's
3. BACTERIA RUN WILD, DEFYING ANTIBIOTICS Source NY Times
A new chapter in the continuing story of antibiotic resistance is being written in doctors' offices across the country
4. CLICK HERE to access the SCIENCE TIMES: EVOLUTION page with multiple interesting articles on evolution.
5. Mammoth Hemoglobin Offers More Clues to Its Arctic Evolution. Source NY Times.
For the first time in 43,000 years, a woolly mammoth has breathed again on earth.
6. As Dinosaurs Waned and Mammals Rose, the Lowly Louse Kept Pace. Source NY Times
Biologists have found a new way to peer back 130 million years in time, illuminating the catastrophic period in which the dinosaurs perished and birds and mammals arose.
7. The Sun Is the Best Optometrist. Source NY Times.
Why is nearsightedness so common in the modern world? In the early 1970s, 25 percent of Americans were nearsighted; three decades later, the rate had risen to 42 percent, and similar increases have occurred around the world.
8. Feathers Trapped in Amber Reveal a More Colorful Dinosaur Age. Source NY Times
Not exactly high-definition color, and some formidable characters may show up in the same old drab and scaly wardrobes; they are dinosaurs, after all, with a reputation for resistance to change. But in time, you can look for splashes of color in museum dioramas of feathered figures from the age of dinosaurs.
9. Australian Aborigine Hair Tells a Story of Human Migration. Source: NY Times
A lock of hair, collected by a British anthropologist a century ago, has yielded the first genome of an Australian Aborigine, along with insights into the earliest migration from the ancestral human homeland somewhere in northeast Africa.
10. Earth's Oxygen: A mystery Easy to Take for Granted. Source: NY Times
To Donald E. Canfield, there’s something astonishing in every breath we take. “People take oxygen for granted because it’s just there and we breathe it all the time,” said Dr. Canfield, a geochemist at the University of Southern Denmark. “But we have the only planet we know of anywhere that has oxygen on it.”
11. Skull Fossils Suggest Simpler Human Lineage. Source: NY Times. OCT 2013
After eight years spent studying a 1.8-million-year-old skull uncovered in the Republic of Georgia, scientists have made a discovery that may rewrite the evolutionary history of our human genus Homo.
12. Wolf to Dog: Scientists Agree on How, but Not Where
A new study points to Europe, not East Asia, the latest chapter in a debate that shows the challenges of piecing together the history of a species.
ECOLOGY
15. Scientists Accidentally Create Mutant Enzyme that Eats Plastic Bottles. The Guardian.
14. RECYCLING HOPE FOR PLASTIC-HUNGRY ENZYME. BBC news
1. A Jolt to Complacency on Food Supply. Source: NY Times
The negative effects of global climate change on agriculture are expected to get worse, experts say, raising deep concerns about the global food supply in the decades to come.
2. Growing Clamor About Inequities of Climate Crisis. Source: NY Times
The devastation in the Philippines has revived the debate over how to address the disproportionate effects of climate change on poorer countries, an issue that has gained momentum but faces daunting challenges.
3. Climate Change Seen Posing Risk to Food Supplies. Source: NY Times
A leaked draft of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that climate change could reduce output and send prices higher in a period when global food demand is expected to soar.
4. TO HELP JAGUARS SURVIVE, EASE THEIR COMMUTE. Source NY Times
LAS LOMAS, Costa Rica — Héctor Porras-Valverdo tried to adopt a Zen attitude when he discovered recently that jaguars had turned two of his cows into carcasses.
5. Q&A: THE COPENHAGEN CLIMATE SUMMIT. Source: BBC News
How can we slow down and cope with the effects of climate change?
6. TOXIC CHEMICALS AND THEIR EFFECTS ON THE HUMAN BODY: THE PLASTIC PANIC. SOURCE: NEW YORKER MAGAZINE
Special thanks to Delfin for sharing this article
6.1 What happens to children that are exposed to pesticides when in the womb?
7. Will we experience a 6th extinction? MULTITUDE OF SPECIES FACE CLIMATE THREAT
8. A Rising Tide of Noise Is Now Easy to See. Source: NY Times. CHECK OUT HOW LOUD IT IS IN THE OCEAN!
The causes are human: the sonar blasts of military exercises, the booms from air guns used oil and gas exploration, and the whine from fleets of commercial ships that relentlessly crisscross the global seas. Nature has its own undersea noises. But the new ones are loud and ubiquitous.
9. In Pursuit of an Underwater Menagerie. Source: NY Times
MAUNA LANI REEF, Hawaii — After a long, cold swim in the dark, we spotted it on the night reef with our dive lights: Octopus ornatus, the ornate octopus, a foot-long creature in an amber shade of orange with bright white spots and dashes along all its arms.
10. The Sloth's Busy Inner Life. Source: NY Times
It’s true that the sloth, which lives in the jungles of Central and South America, would barely prevail in a race with a snail. But it’s not a sluggard because it’s lazy. Rather, it has carved out a remarkably ingenious mode of life in the treetops, but one that imposes certain constraints on its speed and energy level.
12. Bizarre, Glowing Sea Creatures Bloom in the Pacific. National Geographic.
13. Sylvia Earle and Neil deGrasse Tyson Plan a Field Trip. National Geographic.