(English intro to Spanish lang post) Pictures of nine 6-months old transgenic lambs were released yesterday by the Animal Reproduction Institute Uruguay (IRAUy). According to researchers, this is the first time that transgenic lambs have been produced in Latin America. They incorporated the gene coding for the...
(English intro to Spanish lang post) Pictures of nine 6-months old transgenic lambs were released yesterday by the Animal Reproduction Institute Uruguay (IRAUy). According to researchers, this is the first time that transgenic lambs have been produced in Latin America. They incorporated the gene coding for the green fluorescence protein, that makes them aglow under ultraviolet light. A science journalist from Cromo-El Observador was who first and more extensively reported about the announcement. Researchers explain that their goal was to test a new met that can make transgenesis more efficient. In their quotes scientists admit that they are just doing basic research, that they are not planning to work on practical applications, and that other researchers in the world will be able to take advantage of the scientific knowledge they created. That’s a beautiful but quiet naïve view of scientific endeavor, and we think Uruguayan reporters should be more inquisitive about...
When the bombs exploded near the finish line at the Boston Marathon, doctors in the medical tent didn't know what to do: Should they run from danger? Should they go outside to help the injured? Should they stay with their patients in the tent?
According to...
When the bombs exploded near the finish line at the Boston Marathon, doctors in the medical tent didn't know what to do: Should they run from danger? Should they go outside to help the injured? Should they stay with their patients in the tent?
According to a stirring piece by Sushrut Jangi in The New England Journal of Medicine, a family physician, Pierre Rouzier,
texted his wife what might be a good-bye message: There's a bomb at the finish line and we have to help. “I didn't want to die,” he said, “but there were people out there.”
One woman "held his arm and said, "I'm going to die right here, and no one is going to know who I am.' Rouzier held her hand and told her, 'You're not going to die.'"
Much of the piece is a mini-profile of...
24Apr 2013
Jim Handman at Quirks and Quarks has pointed me to an io9 list of 13 smart podcasts that include a few you might know, and...
Jim Handman at Quirks and Quarks has pointed me to an io9 list of 13 smart podcasts that include a few you might know, and some others you likely won't--but you should give them a look. That is, a listen. They are not all science outfits, but they are all science-y. For British humor, try The Infinite Monkey Cage, where the physicist Brian Cox and the comedian Robin Ince team up to inform and entertain. Stuff You Should Know is another worth looking at, as is 99% Invisible. Indeed they all are, including Science Friday, Radiolab, and the other more familiar shows here. Also among the top 13 is Quirks and Quarks,...
The Solutions Journalism Network is tired of stories that tell us what's wrong without telling us what might be done about it.
It says its aim is to recognize and support "critical and clear-eyed reporting that investigates and explains...
The Solutions Journalism Network is tired of stories that tell us what's wrong without telling us what might be done about it.
It says its aim is to recognize and support "critical and clear-eyed reporting that investigates and explains credible responses to social problems," according to its website. "The key is to look at the whole picture, the problem and the response (journalism often stops short of the latter)."
And as one of its first projects, it has set up a fund to support stories on climate change with grants of up to $5,000 to cover expenses. The awards will also include "mentorship from leading journalists" and "access to story-sourcing tools," whatever those might be. (If you're interested,...
Tests done at the now bankrupt Cetero Research lab in Houston to assure the safety of drugs seeking FDA approval were, in many cases, fraudulent, according to an investigation by Rob Garver...
Tests done at the now bankrupt Cetero Research lab in Houston to assure the safety of drugs seeking FDA approval were, in many cases, fraudulent, according to an investigation by Rob Garver and Charles Seife at ProPublica.
In a long story that appeared last week, they reported that "about 100 drugs, including sophisticated chemotherapy compounds and addictive prescription painkillers, had been approved for sale in the United States at least in part on the strength of Cetero Houston's tainted tests."
Astonishingly, Garver and Seife reported that the FDA has apparently not taken any action on the drugs that were approved on the basis of fraudulent testing, and it has not even revealed what those drugs are. "To this day, the agency refuses to disclose the names of the...
Tom Shales was a widely admired columnist for The Washington Post where, he says, he "spent roughly 39 varyingly rewarding years, most of those as TV critic."
"Varyingly" is the key word. Shales, in a post on the About Editing...
Tom Shales was a widely admired columnist for The Washington Post where, he says, he "spent roughly 39 varyingly rewarding years, most of those as TV critic."
"Varyingly" is the key word. Shales, in a post on the About Editing and Writing blog by Jack Limpert, former editor of The Washingtonian, explains that much of the "variation" in his rewards came from editors he had, a few of whom were great, and most of whom were awful. There is no room for mediocrity in Shales's universe.
If you're an editor, you might be inclined to stop reading when you get to this, in the third graf:
I regularly denounced editors as a species, insulting them with such disparagements as, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; those who can’t even teach, edit.” Editors, I liked to say...
Scientific American has taken over YouTube's Space Lab channel, relaunching it today as Scientific American Space Lab.
Scientific American and its editor, Mariette DiChristina...
Scientific American has taken over YouTube's Space Lab channel, relaunching it today as Scientific American Space Lab.
Scientific American and its editor, Mariette DiChristina, partnered with Space Lab in 2012, when Space Lab asked SciAm to contribute to the channel. (DiChristina had been a judge for Space Lab video competition and had appeared on the channel.)
SciAm launched a bi-weekly show called The Countdown--a round-up of the top five space stories in the news, with host Sophie Bushwick. Rachel Scheer, a SciAm spokesperson, said that "as the show flourished, the YouTube Space Lab team handed over the reins of the channel to Scientific American."
The new SciAm-branded channel features two other shows--Ask the Experts, and It happened in Space,...
The tech and culture site The Verge has launched its new Verge Science vertical (what we used to call a science section), with Katie Drummond of Wired as the editor. FishbowlNY ...
The tech and culture site The Verge has launched its new Verge Science vertical (what we used to call a science section), with Katie Drummond of Wired as the editor. FishbowlNY reports that Drummond most recently covered military research at Wired and has also worked at The Daily and AOL News.
Drummond introduces the section (sorry: the vertical) with a video here, which you might want to check out before heading over to The Verge Science. There you will find stories on...
The early reports on the Boston Marathon bombing and the Texas fertilizer plant explosion are not first drafts of history, but "tentative notes for the first drafts of the first drafts of history," as Tabitha M. Powledge writes...
The early reports on the Boston Marathon bombing and the Texas fertilizer plant explosion are not first drafts of history, but "tentative notes for the first drafts of the first drafts of history," as Tabitha M. Powledge writes in On Science Blogs. Meaning that we can expect plenty of revisions before that first draft is correct.
Powledge notes, interestingly, that the Boston Marathon bombing got far more coverage than did the apparent accident in Texas, although it caused far more casualties. Terrorism is a better story than industrial accidents, but which kills and injures more people?
She points out a couple of pieces she didn't like in the bombing commentary. I hadn't seen Paige Williams's post ...
Few creatures stir the imagination like the coelacanth. Scientists thought it had been extinct for millions of years, and then in the 1930s, a specimen seemed to have swum from the Devonian right into a fisherman’s net.
Now scientists have finally sequenced the genome of this elusive, primitive looking...
Few creatures stir the imagination like the coelacanth. Scientists thought it had been extinct for millions of years, and then in the 1930s, a specimen seemed to have swum from the Devonian right into a fisherman’s net.
Now scientists have finally sequenced the genome of this elusive, primitive looking creature to find out how slowly it’s really evolved, and to discern its relationship to those fish that dragged themselves onto land and became our ancestors. The news was announced in a paper in Nature.
At the LA Times, Eryn Brown covered the advance in this story, which told us that it was difficult to get DNA from this highly endangered fish but not how they finally did it. How does one go about getting a DNA sample from a five-...
Right on time - as many years into the mission as is needed to allow three, statistically persuasive blips apiece by other-Earths in orbits like ours - the Kepler Telescope mission has paid off its prime promissory note: habitable planets that are of Earth's approximate size. In fact, astronomers with...
Right on time - as many years into the mission as is needed to allow three, statistically persuasive blips apiece by other-Earths in orbits like ours - the Kepler Telescope mission has paid off its prime promissory note: habitable planets that are of Earth's approximate size. In fact, astronomers with the NASA Ames Research Center program reported they have bagged, with the requisite three orbits each, a numeralogically apt three large and rocky but probably not crazy massive planets. The two-planet report is in Science magazine, that on the third star and its planet is in the Astrophysical Journal .
Big news, gratifying news. Not huge news - that'll come if Kepler, or eventually some even better planet shadow-spotting instrument, reports a world just about spot-on to Earth's specs. The best two of these three, which means they get the most attention in press and that's probably because they are in Science plus are sister worlds which fires...
Medium, the publishing platform created by Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, has purchased Matter, the science and technology...
Medium, the publishing platform created by Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, has purchased Matter, the science and technology journalism platform that publishes one long story a month.
I wrote a couple of critical posts on Matter last November (here and here), mostly about problems I had downloading stories to my Kindle. One of Matter's founders, Bobbie Johnson, asked that I try the site again, because there were still "a lot of wrinkles to iron out."
Start-up issues aside, I confess that I don't get Matter. I'm always happy to see a new...
19Apr 2013
[I will be updating throughout the day with thoughts about Boston Marathon coverage.]
Allow me to say that as an alum and an employee of MIT, it was shocking to learn that the campus had become the scene of a terrorist shootout. The most violent event I can think of on the MIT campus was when it was...
[I will be updating throughout the day with thoughts about Boston Marathon coverage.]
Allow me to say that as an alum and an employee of MIT, it was shocking to learn that the campus had become the scene of a terrorist shootout. The most violent event I can think of on the MIT campus was when it was tear-gassed during Vietham War-era protests. But that was nothing like this.
And condolences to the family of the MIT police officer who was killed. I'm afraid I still cherish university campuses as a place for study and reflection; I'm always heartened to walk through MIT and see students buried in textbooks or collaborating on a project. That officer gave his life to help protect the unique place of MIT in the world, as a distinguished institution that contributes so much more to the world than terrorists can ever hope to erase. I hope that can provide some comfort to his family.
* * *
If you'll pardon the...
Last week, researchers at the University of Bristol published a study in Nature Reviews Neuroscience in which they report that much of what passes for research in neuroscience is--what's the word I'm looking for?--worthless....
Last week, researchers at the University of Bristol published a study in Nature Reviews Neuroscience in which they report that much of what passes for research in neuroscience is--what's the word I'm looking for?--worthless.
The researchers, led by Marcus R. Munafo, entitled their study, "Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience." In their abstract, they note that "a study with low statistical power has a reduced chance of detecting a true effect," and it also allows for "statistically significant" results that do not represent real effects.
"Here, we show that the average statistical power of studies in the neurosciences is very low," they write. That means the studies are likely to overestimate the size of any effect they find, and less likely to...
Dark Matter hit the news this week for the second time recently - hot on the heels of another suggestive but hardly conclusive report (see earlier posts Nov. 17, 2010 and just the other day,...
Dark Matter hit the news this week for the second time recently - hot on the heels of another suggestive but hardly conclusive report (see earlier posts Nov. 17, 2010 and just the other day, April 8, 2013 ) on data from the International Space Station and its alpha magnetic spectrometer team led by MIT physicist Sam Ting.
This time the hints of WIMPs, or Weakly Interactive Massive Particles, is detection of three cosmic something or others that kicked their way through the deeply chilled silicon and germanium crystals of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search. The CDMS detector's builders tucked it into the Soudan Mine underground laboratory in Minnesota. The newest one is often called Super CDMS, as it has better crystals than the...
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