C Carbon

You’ve probably seen dogs working security at airports, sniffing for drugs, bombs and contraband food. Now our best-friend biosensors might have a new task: ferretting out the scent of bird flu.

And they may not be alone on the job. Researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Monell Chemical Senses Center trained mice to identify duck droppings from animals infected with bird flu. The work was presented at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston. [Bruce Kimball et al.]

Every two years the National Science Foundation produces a report, Science and Engineering Indicators , designed to probe the public’s understanding of science concepts. And every two years we relearn the sad fact that U.S. adults are less willing to accept evolution and the big bang as factual than adults in other industrial countries.

Except for this time. Was there suddenly a quantum leap in U.S. science literacy? Sadly, no. Rather the National Science Board, which oversees the foundation, chose to leave the section that discussed these issues out of the 2010 edition, claiming the questions were “flawed indicators of scientific knowledge because responses conflated knowledge and beliefs.” In short, if their religious beliefs require respondents to discard scientific facts, the board doesn’t think it appropriate to expose that truth.

We are always telling stories about the world, the universe, ourselves. It helps to make sense of things. But sometimes, through familiarity or neglect, we get lost. We forget where a story really starts, losing sight of where it’s headed. What is biodiversity? Are electric cars new? Even the well-worn tale of human origins is missing a key chapter: how a small band of hunter-gatherers survived a climate disaster, becoming ancestors of us all. Here we provide the surprising origins of some strange and familiar things.

All In The Family [More]



Hunter-gatherer - Biodiversity - Human evolution - Fiction - Arts

A deadly infectious disease once thought to be exclusively tropical has gained a toehold in the Pacific Northwest, and health experts suspect climate change is partially to blame.

In a head-to-head competition held 10 years ago, scientists at the National Institutes of Health tested two promising new types of vaccine to see which might offer the strongest protection against one of the deadliest viruses on earth, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS. One vaccine consisted of DNA rings called plasmids, each carrying a gene for one of five HIV proteins. Its goal was to get the recipient’s own cells to make the viral proteins in the hope they would provoke protective reactions by immune cells. Instead of plasmids, the second vaccine used another virus called an adenovirus as a carrier for a single HIV gene encoding a viral protein. The rationale for this combination was to employ a “safe” virus to catch the attention of immune cells while getting them to direct their responses against the HIV protein.

One of us (Weiner) had already been working on DNA vaccines for eight years and was hoping for a major demonstration of the plasmids’ ability to induce immunity against a dreaded pathogen. Instead the test results dealt a major blow to believers in this first generation of DNA vaccines. The DNA recipients displayed only weak immune responses to the five HIV proteins or no response at all, whereas recipients of the adenovirus-based vaccine had robust reactions. To academic and pharmaceutical company researchers, adenoviruses clearly looked like the stronger candidates to take forward in developing HIV vaccines.

JULY 1960 INFANT MORTALITY -- “The death rate of U.S. infants, after a long and precipitous decline, has leveled off in the last few years, according to a study by Iwao M. Moriyama of the National Office of Vital Statistics. In some states it has even risen slightly, after reaching an all-time low of 26 per 1,000 live births in 1956. Most of the reduction in mortality of children under one year of age is attributable to control of infectious diseases, primarily influenza and pneumonia. In 1946, when penicillin became available to the public, the death from infectious diseases dropped about 30 per cent. However, infectious diseases still account for about half of the deaths among infants between one month and one year old. The death rate for younger infants reflects the heavy toll taken by noninfectious conditions such as congenital malformations, birth injuries, postnatal asphyxia and premature births.”

Our bodies defeat infections in part because our immune system's genes are many and diverse. This genetic heterogeneity, however, has a downside: it means that we each respond differently to vaccines. For example, compared with women men routinely produce fewer pathogen-fighting antibodies after vaccination, and in the last large U.S. measles outbreak in 1989 10 percent of previously vaccinated children were not protected . But these limitations could one day be overcome thanks to a push to replace one-size-fits-all vaccines with genetically "personalized" immunizations that are safe and effective for everyone. [More]



Vaccination - Immunization - Immune system - Measles - Health

Bubbles. Big ones entertain children and tiny ones tickle champagne aficionados. Even witches appreciate what they bring to a boiling cauldron. If you, too, are a bubble lover, then you’ll enjoy the latest bubble study published in the journal Nature . In it, scientists show that a bursting bubble can leave in its wake a ring of smaller bubbles, a finding that could have implications for disease transmission. [James Bird et al., http://bit.ly/c9dEFy ] [More]



Nature - James Bird - Web Design and Development - Real estate bubble - Harvard University

Scientific American magazine Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina and news editor Philip Yam join podcast host Steve Mirsky (pictured) to talk about the cover story of the June issue of the magazine, "12 Events That Will Change Everything". [More]



Steve Mirsky - Scientific American - Podcast - Editing - Magazine

This allegory was updated at 5:00 p.m.

The first microbe to subsist without exception by genetic patterns synthesized by humans has started proliferating at a lab in the J. Craig Venter Found (JCVI). Venter and his colleagues used a synthetic genome--the genetic instruction set for life--to build and act a new, phony derivation of Mycoplasma mycoides bacteria, according to an online publish published May 20 by Science.


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