Memorial Day

Uhhh ...

... am I missing something out of this article?

Inside many undersea hydrothermal vents, magnesium-rich rocks react with sea water. Such reactions create a heat source that could drive miniature convection currents in nearby pores in the rock, claim Christof Mast and Dieter Braun of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. They propose that such convection could concentrate nucleotides, strands of DNA, and polymerase, providing a setting that would promote replication.

Supposed model for DNA replication without life. Reading this it looks like they've found an environmental equivalent to the conditions found in PCR. Yippee. Only problem is ... where is that naturally-formed, pre-life polymerase coming from?

Back from the ASM 110th General Meeting

And all I have to say at the moment is ... I love San Diego, but the meeting was a huge disappointment.

So sad ...

... Boyzone news. I don't really care about Boyzone, honestly, I don't ... but this section had me a bit perplexed and amused.

The band reformed in 2007 and 2008, and the following year group member Stephen Gately died suddenly aged 33 while on holiday on the Spanish island of Majorca.

I didn't know death by "sudden aging" was possible! I'm not sure what the number 33 has to do with it ... just that whoever wrote this article was probably as enthused writing it, as I was reading it.

Crickets nom nom nom

Bugs as food.

Tuesday Video (May Not Be SFW)

Maybe smallpox wasn't so bad after all?

Found a link to the following article in my ASCP "Daily Diagnosis" e-mail newsletter.

The worldwide eradication of smallpox may, inadvertently, have helped spread HIV infection, scientists believe.

Experts say the vaccine used to wipe out smallpox offered some protection against the Aids virus and, now it is no longer used, HIV has flourished.

For reals?

To test if the events may be linked, the researchers looked at the white blood cells taken from people recently immunised against smallpox and tested how they responded to HIV.

They found significantly lower replication rates of HIV in blood cells from vaccinated individuals, compared with those from unvaccinated controls.

The smallpox vaccine appeared to cut HIV replication five-fold.

How?

The researchers believe vaccination may offer some protection against HIV by producing long-term alterations in the immune system, possibly including the expression of a receptor called CCR5 on the surface of white blood cells, which is exploited by the smallpox virus and HIV.

I wonder if it's possible to revive the smallpox vaccination program. Immunize those most at risk for the disease and then see if we can detect a drop in HIV rates of infection.

Environmental collapse by 2050

Fishless oceans by 2050.

"If the various estimates we have received... come true, then we are in the situation where 40 years down the line we, effectively, are out of fish," Pavan Sukhdev, head of the UN Environment Program's green economy initiative, told journalists in New York.

What?!?!

Seriously?

During sleep, the brain is in its most active state; anesthesia, on the other hand, depresses central nervous system activity. On the operating table, your brain is less active and consumes less oxygen -- a state of unconsciousness nothing like normal sleep.

Doctors do not know exactly how general anesthesia produces this effect.

Bold emphasis mine.

Note to self: Remain healthy.

I had not looked at it ...

... from this perspective.

BP’s incentives are obvious. A deep-sea oil well costs hundreds of millions of dollars to drill, so the company prefers to bumble through never-before-tried recovery efforts than destroy its investment. Furthermore, BP is probably hedging its bets—if it loses this well, lawmakers will likely ban it from drilling there again. In other words, if BP loses the well, it loses both the enormous sunk costs of drilling it and the expected cash flow from all the remaining oil. Thus, even in the midst of this crisis, BP appears to be just as concerned with protecting its shareholders as with stopping this catastrophe.

This is probably dead-on, and it annoys me to no end. Time to force BP to pull the plug on this whole operation and shut down that well immediately, using whatever means necessary.

Like a rainbow in the dark ...

... Ronnie James Dio dead at 67.

Tuesday Video

Idiot

Typical Phillies fan. Got himself tasered for going onto the field. I bet the cop was a Mets fan.

Warranted? Heck yeah.

Should I be honored?

So, I was recently asked to write a book chapter for a new book in the series "Methods in Molecular Biology". Unfortunately, there are a couple of problems with the request:

1. The book chapter deals with work I did about 5 years ago, which means I'm 5 years behind on the literature.
2. In my line of work, book chapters count for ZILCH. Since it's not peer-reviewed, the bean counters at my agency don't care, and at this point I've already pretty much established my impact in this area so a book chapter won't help further.

Now, I've never written a book chapter and my ego is a bit pleased about the invitation. Plus, it's Methods in Molecular Biology, and I've poured over these volumes for my entire career. However I also know what a slog they can be, which really gives me pause. So I'm leaning towards rejecting the offer. However, if someone can give me a valid reason to consider it, I'm all ears (or eyes as the case may be).

Through the looking glass ...

Article found on Science Daily.

Understanding the behavior of Antarctica's ice sheets plays a fundamental role in our ability to build robust, effective global climate models, which are used to predict future climate. "These models rely on constraints imposed by data from the field," the co-chiefs pointed out. "Measurements of parameters such as age, temperature, and carbon dioxide concentration provide invaluable inputs that help increase the accuracy of these models. The more we can constrain the models, the better they'll perform -- and the better we can predict ice sheet behavior."

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