Of Schemes and Memes Blog

Best of Nature Network, nature.com blogs and Scitable: 1 – 16 June

Nobel Prizes

Science can sometimes be a competitive game, especially when it comes to the ultimate accolade, the Nobel Prize. In this week’s Soapbox Science guest post, Morton A. Meyers has adapted a chapter from his latest book that examining the prevalence of disputes over recognition and reward in science:

The thirty-year dispute between Damadian and Lauterbur illuminates two men who in their similarities, differences, and self-contradictions embody the conflicts inherent in scientific discovery. How is credit established? By what measure is priority determined? Is scientific research as driven by elements of human character, particularly ego, as many other endeavors? Does scientific rivalry drive the development of a life-saving technology?

Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting

Continuing the Nobel Prize talk, each year, the Nobel Laureates in science are invited to spend a week on Lake Constance in Germany, meeting a selection of young, international scientists. This year, from 1 to 6 July, over 25 Nobel Laureates and almost 600 young researchers from across the globe will gather on the island of Lindau to brainstorm ideas, discuss projects and build international connections. As we have done for the past two years, Nature is going to be covering this year’s Lindau Nobel Laureates meeting. For regular readers it may come as no surprise that throughout last year’s Lindau conference there was lots of blogging coverage on Of Schemes and Memes. This year is no exception and we intend to bring you a full week of Lindau coverage, linking out to all of the blogs, talks, discussions and tweets surrounding the conference. You can also follow the online conversation from the official Twitter account using @lindaunobel, or by following the #lnlm12 hashtag. Find out more information here.

Detection

Kathleen Raven, in The Spoonful of medicine blogs links out to video about a new rapid and affordable way to detect HIV and syphilis in a developing world setting:

Brilliant Bromine!

Last year, Nature Chemistry ran an essay competition, and you can now read the winning entry, all about bromine:

Bromine was isolated independently by Carl Jacob Löwig from a mineral water spring, and Antoine Balard from seaweed, in 1825 and 1826. Having identified that he’d obtained a substance between chlorine and iodine, Balard first thought it was idodine chloride before recognizing it as a new element. It seems unclear who exactly from Balard or Gay-Lussac thought of the name brôme but we know it comes from the Greek bromos, stench — a fair description of gaseous bromine. In addition to its rather unpleasant smell, bromine is also toxic — as Rattley puts it, bromine’s orange-brown colour is convenient because “avoid it you should”. In the sunlight, elemental bromine (Br2) splits into radicals that readily attack other species, including lung tissues.

Learn more about bromine and its compound in this report.

Business talk

Chris Hillier is asking in the Trade Secrets blog how a small nation would enter the biosciences industry as a novice:

What would it need before it could start to develop its own indigenous biosciences industry? Is this even possible without the billions of dollars that is being spent by the aforementioned countries? Are there indeed minimal requirements necessary for the creation of a sustainable biosciences ecosystem, and, if so, what would they be?

You can hear more of his thoughts in the post.

Can Wine and Chocolate Help You Live Forever?

New York blogger, Jennifer Cable reports on an event she attended last Tuesday night where Joseph Bauer, from the University of Pennsylvania, spoke at the New York Academy of Sciences to help sort through the sensationalist headlines (hers included) looking at claims that resveratrol, a compound found in wine and chocolate, may help you live forever:

 While Bauer presented data on resveratrol with cautious enthusiasm, he was very careful to stress that the benefits and safety of resveratrol are not completely nailed down and the benefits of ingesting resveratrol in the form of commercial supplements such as wine or chocolate, are far from certain. His presentation was a great example of how scientists can present data in a well-balanced manner, acknowledging all the pros, cons and uncertainties, yet still engage an audience. I walked away from the evening enthusiastic about the notion that people want to look beyond the headlines, are willing to listen to the nuances and caveats of scientific research, and aren’t turned off by the fact that, “no, science does not have a simple answer, more research is needed”.

Continue to Jenn’s post to hear more about this event. There’s also been a lot of talk about science communication and outreach this month on Soapbox Science with the Reaching Out series, so check it out.

Green revolution 2.0

PHOTODISC/PHOTOALTO

Subhra Priyadarshini reveals in the Indigenus Blog that an interesting article published in a review magazine of International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) discusses the feasibility of a second green revolution in India this week:

The first green revolution in the 1960s and ‘70s  catapulted India into becoming the second largest agricultural producer of the world. Though its second version might still be some years away, Singh says most experts feel its only a matter of time.

Is the optimism surrounding a possible Green Revolution II real? Find out more in the post.

Extended protection for Australian seas in ‘world first’ reserve network

DUGONG AT SYDNEY AQUARIUM. PHOTO BY CHRISTIAN HAUGEN VIA FLICKR UNDER CREATIVE COMMONS

Daniel Cressey explains in the News Blog thatAustralia’s government has unveiled its final plans for the world’s largest network of marine reserves, and assuaged the fears of many conservationists who said earlier proposals did not go far enough in protecting the country’s unique wildlife:

If the plans make it into national law – as is widely expected – Australia will have 3.1 million square kilometres of marine reserves around its coasts, protecting animals ranging from dugong to corals.

When drafts of the plans were released last year many scientists were highly critical, especially at the perceived lack of protection for the Coral Sea off the north-east coast (see: Australia’s marine plans questioned).

More information s provided in Daniel’s report.

Two new brain areas mapped

Kerri Smith, reporting for the News Blog, explains that Katrin Amunts and her colleagues at the Research Centre Juelich, Germany have found new territories in the brain, rewriting and adding to our brain maps:

What, you thought we’d already got a map of the brain? “We have not got a complete map, and there is no such thing as a single map of the brain,” says Amunts. With major collaborator Karl Zilles, and joined by a host of keen-eyed lab members, over the past 20 years she’s been working on a project to map the brain in fine detail and using various different methods.

S. BLUDAU

Discover more about this research in Kerri’s post

Cell Phones and Health Hazards

Scitbale guest blogger, Kyle Hill, talks about the fears over the potential risks from prolonged cell phone use, in his post:

You may have heard a lot of things about the risks of cell phone use, and most of it is drawn from the fact that cell phones output electromagnetic radiation. When most people hear “radiation,” they think of something akin to chemotherapy or the atomic bomb, without realizing that radiation is just a term that explains how energy is transferred in wave-form. This negative knee-jerk reaction allows people to continue thinking that cell phones cause cancer, chalking it up to plain common sense.

But just what kind of radiation do cell phones output? How much energy is contained in the radiation, and is it enough to cause bodily harm? These are all questions answerable by physics.

HowStuffWorks.com photo credit

Find out the answers to these questions in Kyle’s post.

Unmanned Aircraft

Finally, who knew that speeding over Arctic sea ice, is a small remote-controlled aircraft that snags video footage and high-definition shots of endangered Steller Sea Lions in their natural habitat?

Learn more about this aircraft and how it functions in the Frontier Scientist’s post.

 

Comments

Comments are closed.