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A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog
 Saturday, September 7, 2002
In the August 19 issue of The Scientist, Mignon Fo .... In the August 19 issue of The Scientist, Mignon Fogarty and Christine Bahls survey a range of methods for coping with information overload. "Better search engines, free journal access, proprietary databases and E-mail alerts are all helping scientists get what they want. But some worry that they are not getting all they need." Fogarty and Bahls close with a short profile of BioMed Central. (Thanks to Shelflife.) [FOS News]
BioMed Central is really nice and is trying to create a new way for science to communicate on the web. The article in The Scientist is right on and is one of the areas I would like to make a real impact. Biotech companies that do not have resources in place to deal quickly with this glut of inormation will be left behind. AstraZenaca looks like ti is well on the way. It will be interesting to see how well they succeed.Faculty of 1000 is another site that has smoe very novel approaches to finding important information. It is something else from BioMed Central. 11:48:43 PM 
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The coming ice age. At the stealth conference I'm at we just heard from David Gallo from the Woods Hole Oceanic Institute (WHOI) who has explained that we're entering into a mini-ice age in the next 10-15 years that will drop temperatures 10-15 degrees (Fahrenheit) in the northeastern US and northern Europe. It will last 200-300 years. It is due to the current warming cycle which is melting the polar ice caps which is putting fresh water into the Atlantic which is disrupting the flow of warm air up the coast of the US and cycling down to Europe.
Stockpile eiderdown.
Here's a Discover article. And one from the WHOI. [JOHO the Blog]
I expect to hear all sorts of people claim that this proves that global warming does not exist. But is because of global warming that the Arctic Ice pack is melting, causing the Gulf Stream to shut down. I would expect this to also have a drastic effect on the ecology of the Northern Atlantic. But I also expect it to make skiing in Vermont a whole lot nicer. It will also probably increase the move westward of the population. Although I would also expect rain patterns to be greatly altered, meaning that drought could be a big factor in the West, where water usage is a very important question. 8:39:33 PM
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Friday, September 6, 2002
Thursday, September 5, 2002
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 5:29:49 PM
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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
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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) 5:14:19 PM
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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
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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
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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
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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 4:20:48 PM
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Monday, September 2, 2002
Light switch turns genes on and off [Nature Science Update]
Prettt nifty. Using light to turn on a gene. I wonder how well this could work in a high level expression scheme is bacteria? I will have to check out the literature. Of course, the tricky thing will be incorporating the promoter system into the cell type of choice. But then this is tricky no matter which system you use. 10:33:33 PM
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Long-stalled appointment at FDA is crucial to biotech. San Francisco Chronicle Sep 2 2002 12:57PM ET [Moreover - moreover...]
How can we be almost 2 years into a presidential term without an FDA head? There does not seem to be any movement at all. This is an important position that can have huge ramifications on healthcare, yet, no one can be found. Hard to believe. 10:29:46 PM
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Brain Disease Rises in Deer, Scaring Hunters. People in Wisconsin and the Rocky Mountain states are worried about chronic wasting disease, the variant of mad cow disease that afflicts deer and elk. By Sandra Blakeslee. [New York Times: Science]
This, more than anything else, could 'kill' hunting in the US. Although I do not believe that this wasting disease could be transmitted easily to humans, we just do not know. Most of these diseases, from kuru to mad cow disease, appear to proceed from the digestion of various sweetbreads of the animals. You need to ingest a fair amount of the altered prions, which are found mainly in the brain. But, the overall progression is just not easily defined. It takes a long time to develop the disease, making the actual progression hard to identify. Various models may not accurately define the actual disease. But, if you do not have to eat venison, why take the chance?
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