Study: Closeness to mother can delay first instance of sexual intercourse among younger teens. Teenagers are less likely to start having sex when their mothers are involved in their lives, have a close relationship with them, and stress the importance of education, according to new findings from the largest survey ever conducted with adolescents in the United States. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation [EurekAlert - Medicine & Health]

Well, what about the father? When the teenagers were not having sex, the mothers knew, but when the kids were having sex, the mother's were right only 50% of the time. When the mother knows the teenager's friends, they are less likely to be sexually active. However, this report is short on numbers but you can get the results online at:

General Pediatrics and Adolescent Health

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Exercise can ease knee pain from arthritis [Reuters Health eLine]

Well, they do not say what exercises were done but this is not too surprising.

Therapeutic Exercise for People with Osteoarthritis of the Knee. A Systematic Review

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Gonorrhea test kits recalled due to error potential [Reuters Health eLine]

Now there is a headline you don't want to read. Seems that 32 lots would give galse negatives. So you could hvae gonorrhea but the test would say you did not. I would think that, even if Abbott will reimburse people for the tests, this could cause them some legal problems.  5:17:03 PM    

Staff steal from work, not managers. Nature Sep 3 2002 7:57PM ET [Moreover - moreover...]

A nice study that appears to indicate that people will steal from a faceless company much more than if they know the people personally. This quantifies what many of us know: if treated like consumers by a large corporation, especially one with weak ethics itself, people will steal, rip, trade and pirate the products. If treated as customers by a well-regarded member of the community, one that has consistently demonstrated that the needs of the customers comes first, little theft occurs. Do you think the big boys would ever examine this study? Here is the link:

Greenberg, J. Who stole the money, and when? Individual and situational determinants of employee theft. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 89, 985 - 1003, (2002)

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Chicago researchers find why uncircumcised men have more HIV [EurekAlert!]

No they did not find out why. What they found out was that foreskin tissue from adults had more of the cells HIV likes to infect than the foreskin from children. This makes a nice hypothesis (Uncircumcised men have more of these cells available for HIV to infect than circumcised men) but leaves open a big question. How many cells are present in circumcised men? The authors themselves state 'that a limitation of the study is that they were unable to obtain tissue from circumcised penises for comparison.' So they do not know whether any adult male has large numbers of cells available for infection. They have not done the proper control. The problem is that you can get the tissue left over following circumcision fairly easily. Foreskin fibroblasts are commonly used. But few circumcised men will probably want to have a biopsy taken from the end of their penis. Thus the lack of tissue. So they are going to do an epidemiological study. It will take them 4 years to get the results. IN the meantime, I can guarantee you that the media and doctors will take this report and conclude, circumcise everyone, just to be sure. Now, I happen to think this hypothesis has a lot of merit. But it has not been proven yet. ANy circumcised men want to volunteer;-)   5:04:11 PM    

Networking is the key. As so many people have told me: networking is the key to starting a successful business.  To this end I have joined both Ryze and E-cademy which are online networking sites where you can build a profile and hopefully connect up with people who have similar or complementary interests. [Curiouser and curiouser!]

I wonder if this sort of networking will work for me.  4:51:32 PM    

Study finds new target for development of anti-cancer drugs [EurekAlert!]

Microtubules have been implicated in tumors for some time. This research may lead to an understanding of why. The protein, km23, is heavily involved in the trafficking of proteins via microtubles. This protein is altered in 45% of the tumor samples examined. This is a pretty high number. Now, it is a long, long way to developing an drug that can target this protein, much less fix any problems found in cancerous tissue. The headline exaggerates somewhat. But, this is a very interesting new area to investigate and, who knows, maybe we will get lucky. It has happened before.  4:35:44 PM    

Neanderthal Baby Skeleton Found [AP Science]

A great example of how poor information flow can hamper the quest for scientific knowledge. The skeleton was found in France in 1914. IN the 20s, the bones vanished when they were supposedly sent to Paris. Someone found them in a small town museum in 1996 while cataloging the contents. They were in a drawer, unlabeled. Bruno Maureille then proceeded to track down just where this came from, and discovered that they were the long lost bones of a Neanderthal. Amazing. This find could have a very strong effect on current research, since it is a fairly complete skeleton. All because someone did the grunt work to find out where the bones came from. I bet these bones had been found before, but no one took the effort. Just think, if they had had a good knowledge management system, like index cards, we never would have lost the remains.  4:29:50 PM    

Triassic reptile saw red [Nature Science Update]

As one of the quoted scientists said, 'This is cool!' They examined various rhodopsins from mammals, birds, reptiles, etc. Then they 'back-calculated' what the protein would have looked like 240 million years ago, with the last common ancestor. Now, there is no way to know for certain that the sequence they came up with IS the same but it could be based on simulations. But they did not stop there. They went ahead and synthesized the proteins, proteins that do not exist in today's world but might have 240 million years ago. The protein bound retinol, required for activation by light, showing that they were functional. The rhodopsin-retinol complex absorbed light of a slightly redder wavelength than ones in extant animal. So they could see better at night. If they had rhodopsin like postulated. Again, impossible to know but an intriguing hypothesis. Now scientists could look to see if their is any other information to support this conjecture. That is what makes science so neat. Here is the abstract for the paper.

Recreating a Functional Ancestral Archosaur Visual Pigment
Belinda S. W. Chang*, Karolina Jönsson*, Manija A. Kazmi*, Michael J. Donoghue and Thomas P. Sakmar

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