Foody thoughts
This week the KFC Double Down arrived on Australian shores, prompting blogger MuKa to investigate the amount of Kilojoules contained in other junk food treats. His results conclude that almost all readily available takeaways (aside from Subway) contain an unhealthy amount of kilojoules – some nearly as much as your daily allowance!
OMG! The Quarter Pounder and Double Whopper (with fries) exceed my recommended daily fat intake (70 g).
Muka also points out that we can’t help adding chips or a fizzy, sugary drink to our tasty takeaway treat, which leads nicely into the latest post on The Skeptical Chymist blog. Their post, All in good taste, summarises a talk by Eric Anslyn on mimicking the yummy tastes of sugars in fizzy drinks:
Anslyn is a Coca-Cola man…by which I mean that he doesn’t like the taste of the diet version – I presume this applies to other soda brands as well. It’s not just him though, his chemistry can tell the difference too.
Devastating Events
Fear Not the Black Swan is Graham Morehead’s latest post which considers that every complex system is unpredictable to some degree, but are these events which result in devastating consequences, in any way preventable?
The whole world, it seems, suffered from the collapse of the U.S. housing market. Was this collapse a black swan? Was it preventable? Every complex system is unpredictable to some degree. The planet itself is a complex system that surprised us all with a recent 9.0 magnitude earthquake in Japan. We can’t control what the planet does even if we work together, but perhaps we can sustain our economic systems. Like Taleb, I hope our systems become more robust. I believe, however, that this recent economic collapse was entirely preventable.
Sadly, Japan was unable to prevent some of the devastating events that took place last month, following the unprecedented magnitude 9 earthquake, resulting in a destructive tsunami. However, huge attempts are being made to prevent further nuclear fallout at the Fukushima Daichii power plant. NPG’s The Great Beyond Blog, is keeping us regularly posted on the events. In their latest update they remind us that, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the situation remains “very serious.” In another post, they discuss the possible effects of radiation doses on pregnant women. This follows a rush of news stories revealing that pregnant women were fleeing Tokyo, fearing the effects of Fukushima radiation on their unborn children.
Science in film
This week saw the conclusion of our mini-series on science as seen on screen. Last week we asked our readers to vote for their favourite Nature video. Congratulations to "Lego Antikythera mechanism ":https://blogs.nature.com/u6e5b2ce1/2011/03/29/and-the-winner-is-wt video that scooped up 42% of the vote and now officially holds the title of Best Nature Video, as voted by Nature Network readers. Thanks to everyone who took part. A breakdown of the results can be found in the post, as well as the video itself.
Our science as seen on screen theme continues to be a popular subject, and blogger Paige Brown has been revealing more about the scientifically inspired script behind the film Gattaca. She considers the possibilities of the ideas contained in the film and offers an explanation for genetic sequencing, discussing the controversial topic of genetic discrimination.
Now onto a face that has been a familiar feature on our screen for decades. Elizabeth Taylor, who sadly passed away last week, will be remembered chiefly as an on-screen legend, a social activist and a fashion icon, but what you perhaps didn’t know is that she was also a clinical trial subject. Abbott Laboratories, a Chicago-based pharmaceutical company, included Elizabeth among 300 study subjects enrolled in the Endovascular Valve Edge-to-Edge Repair Study (EVEREST II), a clinical trial testing an experimental medical device called MitraClip. On The Spoonful of Medicine’s post, you can watch a video of Ted Feldman, a cardiologist at Northshore University, who is leading the EVEREST II trial.
Anniversary of a burning issue
This week marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Robert Bunsen who invented (or possibly didn’t, but who cares?) The Bunsen burner – luckily before the advent of the health and safety culture! The Skeptical Chymist have been discussing what else he contributed to the scientific community:
Apart from almost poisoning himself while developing a cure for arsenic poisoning, he played a crucial role in the development of spectroscopy. He then used his spectroscope to discover caesium and rubidium from their emission spectra – and isolate them from mineral spring water. 40 tons of water gave up just 50 grams of caesium. In work that feels remarkably modern, he replaced expensive platinum electrodes with carbon to produce a battery that was widely used in arc lighting and electroplating.
Work and advice
Richard Williams has been asking for advice on how to manage his workload, after the realisation that he has to climb a metaphorical ‘journal article mountain.’
Is this experience normal, and therefore just the natural progression through the journey of a PhD? Am I missing a trick somewhere?
Advice is suggested in his comment thread. Meanwhile, Scitable’s blog, Bioscience and eLearning, have also been giving some good advice by suggesting ways to make work easier for teachers by using an iPad (or equivalent) for marking and/or feedback. Blogger Nick Morris, who is a senior lecturer at Newcastle University says:
I think the iPad is a great tool providing feedback on work, and I guess it would also be great for marking.
Technology advancement – give and take
The Great Beyond Blog is also offering some twitter advice for those online-savvy professors: keep it personal.
From the night’s television to what the cat dragged in, professors who want to gain credibility with their students should give up tweeting scholarly material and instead concentrate on tweeting social snippets of their lives. At least this is the message from a new study of 120 undergraduate students published in the current issue of the journalLearning, Media and Technology.
Bob O’Hara’s latest post considers how the web has changed science research, enabling you to search for information online. Amusingly he highlights generational differences when it comes to technology advances:
Fortunately, what technology taketh away, technology giveth. After I had vented my frustration, I used google to search (my elder readers may wish to follow this link to know what I’m writing about) for “linear model of coregionalization”. After a couple of false starts, I found a paper that described it well enough for my needs. So it turned out well in the end.
Guest posts
This week’s guest blogger is Patricia Fara, a lecturer on the History of Science at Cambridge University. In her post, she discusses some of the problems she faced when deciding how to begin her most recent book, Science: A Four Thousand Year History.
To write Science: A Four Thousand Year History, I had to decide when science began. This is no trivial question, but gets right to the heart of what science might be.
Meanwhile, Scilog’s guest post this week is on The Genetic Priming of Religiosity – by John Jacob Lyons. Lyons suggests that religiosity has not been assimilated into the human genome. There is neither a gene, nor a clutch of genes, for religion. However, he does believe that our genomes have been primed for religiosity and that all we need is just a simple trigger from the environment to manifest religious behaviour. Find out more in his summary.
Drugs
This week the Bioentrepreneur blog have been discussing how much it costs to develop a drug: The post reveals that in comparison to 2003 where costs for developing a drug were around $800 million, the figure has now ratcheted up to $1.2 billion. However, a new study is suggesting this figure isn’t accurate. The post links to some interesting resources and more information on this subject.
The Spoonful of Medicine blog, brought to you by Nature Medicine_, have been discussing a specific drug, Makena. Tin February the KV Pharmaceuticals (St. Louis-based company) behind the preterm labour drug, set off a bit of a scare by sending a letter to compound pharmacies saying that these pharmacies should stop producing the cheaper alternative of their drug which lacks formal approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In their post, To compound or not to compound,15.html they reveal that the FDA won’t go after these pharmacies, so long as the compounded version remains safe and is of good quality.
Clock this
Our Boston blogger, Tinker Ready, last week reminded those in the area to attend MIT’s Women & Science meeting. This week she has provided us with a brief summary of the event and you can also check out her Twitter page for a full report.
Matt Brown has revealed to us in his London blog that one of his absolute favourite features of Cambridge is coming to the Science Museum in April – well sort of. The chronophage is a magnificent golden clock, with no hands or numbers, and features a temporally ravenous beast. The original is permanently on show outside Corpus Christi College Library in Cambridge and the new version will go on display at the Science Museum from 18 April. For pictures of these clocks, check out Matt’s post.
For those who are interested in science communication and publishing, we have compiled a public calendar of the latest events in London and the surrounding areas. We’ll regularly update the calendar so that the coming month contains the events that we’re aware of. Do let us know if we are missing any events and, if you would like to add one to the calendar, feel free to leave a comment.
Finally: The bear necessities
In the run up to Easter, Barbara Ferreira has been talking to us about The giant bunny of Minorca. The discovery of the Nuralagus rex, which roughly translates to ‘Minorcan king of hares,’ lived on the island 3 to 5 million years ago. What is most interesting about this rabbit, is its extraordinarily big size. It weighed an average of 12kg, or about 10 times more than the common European rabbit. Find out more in her post.
Onto another big animal, Anne-Marie Hodge has been talking about the South America Bear which holds the record for the largest known bear. Arctodus simus, from the genera Arctotherium, is known for having been found in great numbers in the La Brea Tar Pits. They were seriously formidable, attaining sizes that would have made modern grizzlies and polar bears look paltry. She suggests reasons for this mega-bear’s disappearance, and asks why, if its large size was so hard to maintain, did it develop in the first place?
