At Duke University Hospital, reports staff writer Jean P. Fisher, surgeons are using a catheterization procedure to close small but abnormal passages between the left and right heart chambers of patients who also have migraines. Duke, it says here, is part of a ten-center clinical trial doing surgeries on patients who otherwise don’t require the […]
AP: Britain Rolls Out Bird Flu Crisis Plan
It’s a voracious bird flu, not an easily-spread human flu yet, but it keeps spreading. The AP’s David Stringer sends an update from the Great Britain of reactions after one confirmed case in the UK — the swan found a short time ago in Scotland dead from the ominous H5N1 virus. Read it NYTimes’s Sarah […]
AP, Sacto Bee, etc: California’s green sturgeon a threatened species
Beleagured sturgeon have gotten a flurry of California press clippings lately. The latest from AP that the feds will protect the green sturgeon under the Endangered Species Act: Read it Ditto from Sacramento Bee: Read it Related feature: Sacto Bee’s M. S. Enkoji with a nice report after a day with a fishing guide hunting […]
LA Times, SF Chronicle, etc: Volcanic fumes deadly for CA ski patrol
Three ski patrol members at Mammoth Mountain ski resort died Thursday after tumbling into a snow-covered pit where a fumarole’s carbon dioxide gas made the air deadly. Science writers came in to explain the geology of it. Reports: LA Times Usha Lee McFarling SF Chronicle Carl T. Hall
NYTimes/Int’l Herald Tribune: Scary details on that British drug test fiasco
Reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal (via International Herald Tribune) lands on NYTimes’s front page with a Saturday feature on the horrors that six men in Britain underwent after being the first humans to receive an experimental monoclonal antibody treatment as an immune stimulant. The essential story has been reported widely in the US. This fills in some […]
Chr. Sci. Monitor: Ocean microbes swap genes willy nilly to evolve with almost no rules
Science writer Robert C. Cowen does a take out inspired by reports in Science magazine last month, learning from researchers at MIT and Woods Hole that various strains of one species of bacterium “swap genes as readily as college students swap songs over the Internet.” It’s no blockbuster like that fossil fish-land beast missing link […]