A landmark paper appearing in Nature, RNA-mediated non-mendelian inheritance of an epigenetic change in the mouse. Like any landmark paper, it raises more questions than it answers, but nonetheless deals another serious blow to almost all facets of the prevalent dogma in molecular genetics. In this spirit, see also:
With Canada's "presidente" pulling us out of kyoto comes fear we will go the way of China with it's polluted rivers and desertification. If Al Gore's movie can't scare him, maybe this study (in the journal that rhymes with penis) on global warming and poison ivy will...
Ha. These pro-fossil fuel ads do a better job ridiculing themselves than I ever could. "Carbon dioxide is what we breathe out" - how could that be a bad thing? And by the way, the glaciers aren't melting, they're getting bigger. Don't believe the hype - the Earth's flat, happy and cool as a cucumber. Have you heard it complain lately?
Alarm was raised last year when influenza virus serotype H5N1 killed thousands of bar-headed geese at Qinghai Lake in Northwest China. The concern was that as the geese migrated the virus might spread all over Asia and Europe and establish itself througout domestic poulty populations. A full migratory season has passed since then however, and this has proven not to be the case. However it has now come out that the Chinese government has actually been conducting domestication experiments with this same species of wild goose, artificially rearing them on farms in the Qinghai Lake region. This includes raising the geese at high population density, on the very same farms as CHICKENS. Very sketchy. They apparently even re-release some of the geese back into the wild. Also sketchy. With stuff like this going on, it's a small wonder we're seeing new pathogenic strains of virus emerge. The crazy thing these days is that one sketchy little farming experiment on the other side of the world could kill people everywhere if such a virus were to ever go transmissible in humans.
This BBC show was supposed to feature an interview with an internet expert, instead a guy who was around the studio for a job interview got accidently thrown onstage. The funniest part is that the interviewer doesn't seem to have a clue, appearing deeply interested in his insight into the online music biz (ie - "you can get everything, fast"). Apparently he later said he went along beacause he thought it was an initiation prank. Ah, so easy to overestimate the intelligence of TV executives.
A great example of evolution in action, humans recently discovered the first known polar-grizzly bear hybrid. What did we do? Damn right, we shot that bad-boy dead. Probably make a nice trophy in someone's living room. From look of his eyes I'd say there was a bit of pizzly-boxing going on too. Goes to show, we're so good at killing off species, they're going extinct before they even exist. That's right, gotta nip 'em in the bud. Don't worry - I'm sure all you tree-hugging scientists out there will get a chance to study a grolar bear soon enough. The North Pole's only getting warmer and greener and there'll be plenty more polar bear's makin' babies with grizzlies before they go extinct.
More studies are needed to investigate any causational relations with alcohol. In totally unrelated news: neat rebuttal in Science on mating strategies.
Some cool stories today about caloric restriction in humans, and the ontogeny of hair. Friendly tip of the day: never search google images for hairy, trust me on this one...
Some neat pictures to be taken with x-ray microtomography, thanks to a technique called time-delay integration. No words if they have it in sunglasses version yet...
We have all put some dry ice in a falcon tube and tossed it as a grenade to Rob before. Turns out you can go to prison for it... Also some (lame) jet propulsion experiments with dry ice. We can do better... and pics of a guy who had one of these bombs blow in his face and thumb.
So the other day I'm on the airplane perusing the Globe and Mail's Report on Business. After going through a few pieces on the current oil boom, a large corporate job ad caught my eye - seems the OHRI is looking for a
new CEO and scientific director. If you're in the market for a high-paying job (we're talking 300 grand), you must have a "PhD, MD/PhD or MD and an outstanding record as a medical or health sciences researcher, and have demonstrated leadership skills through previous executive positions". The ad offers candidates the reins to the OHRI's "state-of-the-art research facilities, an operating budget of $74.2M, and a workforce of almost 300 scientists and clinical investigators, more than 250 graduate students and over 500 support staff". I was interested to learn that I was part of someone's workforce, even if I had to read it in the business section of the newspaper to find out. So I was also intrigued to read that the new CEO will be "reporting to the Board of Directors and to the Hospital President". It had never occured to me that the OHRI was run by a board of directors (although I guess it makes sense because every corporation is) so I was very interested to know who was on it. Turns out nearly half (8/19) are executives of private corporations, a couple are political types, and the others are governing members of the Ottawa Hospital and/or the University of Ottawa. They apparently serve as "gracious" volunteers, although you can bet that membership to this club is by invitation only.
This just sounds too cool not to mention. These guys at Georgia Tech have outfitted gold dopped antibodies to a self-assembling membrane, so that binding of the antigen (mesothelin here) changes the resonnance frequency in a quantifiable manner. In essence it's sorta like an ELISA assay that you read with a microphone.
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