tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-101211912011-12-05T06:26:36.057-08:00Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.comBlogger271100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1168219984529752792007-01-07T17:32:00.000-08:002007-02-14T23:34:42.716-08:00

Anthony Atala and coworkers at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine reported in Nature Biotechnology that they have been able to harvest stem cells from amniotic fluid. The cells, named amniotic fluid-derived stem (AFS) cells, exhibit characteristics between embryonic and adult stem cells. These AFS cells, unlike embryonic stem cells, are readily

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1167978538286873312007-01-04T22:28:00.000-08:002007-01-04T22:28:58.286-08:00

The Scientist is running an article describing how George Lucas' midichlorians have made the move from Force-wielding microorganisms in the Star Wars galaxy, to the mitochondria of tick ova. While the naming is caused Mental Floss to pick up the story, the existence of a bacterial species living inside mitochondria, which is practically a baterium itself, is unprecendented it would seem. It's not

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1164306284503653022006-11-23T10:16:00.000-08:002006-11-23T10:29:40.453-08:00

Scientists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge reported some ground-breaking findings in human genetics yesterday. According to their findings, the human genome varies much more wildly between individuals than previously thought.Our genome is about 3 billion DNA base pairs long. This sequence of letters (A, C, G, and T) is responsible for everything from the development of a

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1159335176720618972006-09-26T22:09:00.000-07:002007-02-17T19:27:41.116-08:00

Thanks to Chemistry & Engineering News, the Sames/Sezen Scandal is back in the news. Yesterday the following letter from Paul Mengnjoh appeared on their site:I was disappointed to read that Columbia University chemistry professor Dalibor Sames retracted four more scientific papers (C&EN Online Latest News, June 16). I wonder if this is a trend of a professor and student getting into serious

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1150576826143708642006-06-17T12:01:00.000-07:002006-06-17T13:40:26.150-07:00

Splenda, which comes in those little yellow packages that now reside alongside those red and blue satchels of sugar substitutes at restaurants, has got its fair share of press over the years. There's plenty of opinions on whether this "made from sugar" sugar substitute is safe to eat or not. Some have compared the structure of Splenda (the trade name of sucralose) to DDT, which others compare it

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1150478856859196032006-06-16T10:23:00.000-07:002006-06-16T10:27:36.900-07:00

Chemistry & Engineering News wrote a follow-up story on the Sames-Sezen retractions today. Although there is not much more in the way of details past what the New York Times wrote yesterday, I cannot resist including this quote from Bengü Sezen regarding the potential irreproducibility of her experiments:"It is as simple as this: You can not make espresso without coffee beans. Prof. Sames and

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1150396778919472172006-06-15T11:30:00.000-07:002006-06-15T11:39:38.970-07:00

The New York Times reported today that Dalibor Sames, a Columbia University chemistry professor, has retracted four more papers after the results could not be reproduced in his labs. Back in March, Sames retracted two other papers published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society for the same reason. All of the results in question was performed by a former graduate student in Dalibor's,

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1149259415238269232006-06-02T07:40:00.000-07:002007-02-17T02:52:18.676-08:00

New Scientist recently described a study from France regarding the potential that high levels of heavy metal in children can lead to autism. According to this article the researches found that children with autism had increased levels of porphyrins in their urine. Note they are not directly measuring the levels of the heavy metals that they are implicating as a potential cause, but rather are

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1146100983000122012006-04-26T18:02:00.000-07:002006-04-27T22:58:02.376-07:00

The Discovery Channel recently reported a study that will appear in thePersonality and Individual Differencesjournal entitled "The relationship between date of birth and individual differences in personality and general intelligence: A large-scale study." This article by Peter Hartmann investigates the link (or lack there of) between personalities and astrological signs. Two large samples (4000+

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1144855455098942172006-04-12T08:22:00.000-07:002007-02-16T02:37:28.013-08:00

Samuel Bodman, the US Secretary of Energy, has disbanded the Department of Energy's advisory board. The Secretary of Energy Advisory Board (SEAB) will be shut down after it completes its final report this May. DOE spokes Craig Stevens had this to say about closing the advisory board: "[Bodman] believes that we have a strong agenda moving forward with the American Competitiveness and Advanced

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1143098172907445042006-03-22T23:13:00.000-08:002006-03-22T23:16:12.950-08:00

CNN and the BBC recently reported results from this Nature paper on why the Avian Flu Virus (H5N1) does not readily spread between humans. Viruses can recognize certain dissacharides on the surfaces of cells. Dissacharides (think 'double-sugars') can be attached in a number of different ways. It turns out that human flu viruses bind preferentially to a dissacharide composed of sialic acid

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1137184400940563642006-01-13T12:33:00.000-08:002006-01-13T12:33:20.970-08:00

Chemical & Engineering News is featuring an article from the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences on a new discovery in how our blood clots. Researchers have discovered that a common inorganic polymer, polyphosphate, helps speed blood clotting and slows a protein that is responsible for destroying clots. The mechanism by which our body heals cuts and scrapes was thought to be fully

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1136530766057282112006-01-05T22:52:00.001-08:002006-01-05T22:59:26.063-08:00

An article in the January 10th issue ofAstrophysical Journal Lettersreports the first evidence of some interesting organic molecues in the dust cloud of a star not too different from our own Sun. Signals suggestive of acetylene and hydrogen cyanide were recorded. These basic chemical building blocks are a long way from amino acids and proteins. Calling them "gaseous precursors to DNA and protein,

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1121896416993130572005-07-20T14:28:00.000-07:002007-02-17T10:47:24.526-08:00

The periodic table has remained basically unchanged in its organization since Mendeleev arranged the chemical elements in order of increasing mass in 1869. There have been many additions made, but his arrangement is a rosetta stone to understanding the structure and reactivity of molecules.Slate (covered by /.) published this article yesterday describing "a new periodic table of the elements" and

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1114633671092085282005-04-27T13:23:00.000-07:002005-04-27T13:27:51.093-07:00

The Baltimore Sun announced today that Celera Genomics, the private company that was part of the race to sequence the human genome, will allow free access to its DNA sequence data via the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Celera had been trying to sell access to this information, for use in drug discovery and other potentially profitable ventures, but, as you can see from a chart of

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1114358414224617872005-04-24T09:00:00.000-07:002005-04-24T09:02:31.003-07:00

Two students at MIT recently wrote a program called SciGen, which randomly generates Computer Science research papers. Last week, one of their randomly generated papers got accepted to a conference. This was covered on /. and CNN (who calls it a prank), among many others.Today, NewScientist.com is reporting that a Microsoft research lab in Cambridge, UK has verified a mathematical proof

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1114278515230252382005-04-23T10:31:00.000-07:002005-04-23T10:48:35.233-07:00

Researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center recently reported that they can induce hibernation in mice, described in an article in the April 22 issue of Science. By exposing these mice to 80 ppm hydrogen sulfide (H2S) a 50% reduction of metabolic rate was observed within 5 minutes. If they left the mice in this environment for 6 hours, the rates dropped by 90%, and their body

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1113065597052447452005-04-09T09:53:00.000-07:002005-04-09T09:53:17.053-07:00

Law students everywhere are going to groan when they read this article in the current issue of the Columbia Law Review. Why? The authors are asserting that law and public policy can benefit from a biological understanding of human behavior. Although the slope may be slippery, they're not suggesting that the law begin to acknowledge the notion of genetic determinism (which says your genes made you

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1110397392622709852005-03-09T11:21:00.000-08:002005-03-09T11:43:12.626-08:00

The American Chemical Society, the largest professional scientific society in the world with 158,000 members, announced today that it will be expanding access to articles in all of its 33 journals. One year after publication, ACS will post manuscripts on the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central, a free digital archive. This is in response to this new policy from the NIH:Beginning May 2,

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1110348017996984142005-03-08T20:15:00.000-08:002005-03-08T22:23:40.653-08:00

The origin of planets, their orbital irregularities, and their differences in chemical composition has confounded astronomers for hundreds of years. A new theory put forth in the Astrophysical Journal has a very interesting take on this classical problem.Pre-planetary dust was covered, or composed mostly of, frozen water. When water freezes at normal temperatures and pressures on our planet, you

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1109405832356189052005-02-25T23:14:00.000-08:002005-02-26T22:03:00.293-08:00

Live fast and die young. Although there are exceptions, most big animals live a long time, while small ones live fast and die young. Metabolic rates, the speed at which an organism gets energy from food, seem to be proportional to body mass raised to the 3/4 power."It appears as if we've been gifted with just so much life, you can spend it all at once or slowly dribble it out over a long time."

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1109398071350529712005-02-25T21:44:00.000-08:002005-02-25T23:04:35.863-08:00

Death and taxes. We all age and unless Aubrey de Gray's Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence actually do work soon, we're all going to die. As we age, bodily functions begin to break down - memories fade and muscles strain. A recent publication in Nature uncovers another piece of the puzzle of how our cells age.Thomas Rando and coworkers at the Stanford University School of Medicine

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1108189641812245162005-02-11T21:23:00.000-08:002005-04-23T10:20:44.473-07:00

In the most current issue of Nature, scientists from the University of Texas Medical Branch, UC Berkeley, and University of Oklahoma report their finding on the "Directed aerial descent in canopy ants." The ants under investigation, the species Cephalotes atratus, can direct themselves back to their tree should they fall, or dropped from a pair of tweezers in this study. This is pretty important

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1107724448756850562005-02-04T19:25:00.000-08:002005-02-11T22:29:28.816-08:00

You've all heard of ozone (O3) before; it's a reactive gas found in the upper atmosphere of our planet that blocks lots of harmful solar radiation. Discovered first by Christian Schönbein, ozone is used industrially to disinfect bottled water, and clean and bleach clothing. That's all well and good, but not really worth getting into now.What is news worthy is that a, as-of-yet unobserved, cyclic

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1107224592636098382005-01-31T23:10:00.000-08:002007-02-15T07:07:44.706-08:00

There has been a lot of press recently on the effects of scientific patents on innovation - specifically, how they can hinder further development, and the dissemination of knowledge. Wired says the lines have been drawn between independent organizations like BIOS (Biological Innovation for Open Society), Open Source Biology, and more generally Science Commons, and big evil corporations like

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1106027428342129362005-01-18T13:32:00.000-08:002005-02-01T17:18:55.053-08:00

A real understanding of how our brains work stands as a frontier of science today. Even though we've sequenced the human genome in its entirety, understanding how we create thoughts, store memories, or experience music remains rudimentary at best. The tools necessary to study these processes are just now becoming sophisticated enough to begin tackling these important questions. CNN recently

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10121191.post-1105582594010649352005-01-12T18:10:00.000-08:002007-02-16T14:00:21.856-08:00

It's the first post on Occam's Blog. I feel like I should explain my mission here - why I'm doing this, what I hope to gain from the experience, and what I hope I can help you with. First the selfish reasons: I do not have a lot of reasons to write in a non-scientific voice on a day-to-day basis. The writing that my work calls for is usually technical in nature and there are a whole separate

Williamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06061973303352076094noreply@blogger.com0