More thoughts on lab meat
Yesterday, Rob told you about the first public tasting of a burger that was grown in a laboratory, from strips of flesh built up from muscle stem cells. I found a couple of great links today that build...
View ArticleHelp ocean scientists build open-source research tools
CTD units are incredibly important to ocean research, measuring three basic factors of sea water — conductivity, temperature, and depth. Almost every major research vessel has one. But the units are...
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A big win for consent, privacy, and genome data
The family of Henrietta Lacks — a woman whose cervical cancer cells were harvested and used in scientific research for decades without her knowledge or consent — will now play a role in deciding who...
View ArticleWhat causes an ice cream headache?
It would take a simple experiment to prove, once and for all, what causes "brain freeze". Unfortunately/fortunately the condition isn't particularly serious, so nobody has ever gotten a grant to...
View ArticleThings that correlate with autism
"Things that correlate with autism" is basically an entire genre of scientific research, in and of itself, and nobody does a better job of breaking those studies down than Emily Willingham. Her latest...
View ArticleNeurosurgeons at UC Davis censured after trying out probiotic treatments on...
The Sacramento Bee is reporting on a complicated story about last-ditch treatments and the ethics of human experimentation. Glioblastomas are incredibly deadly brain cancers that usually kill the...
View ArticleHow to: Read a scientific research paper and come away smarter
Anthropologist Jennifer Raff offers this great guide, aimed at laypersons, that will help you learn more from reading the scientific research papers you find online and prevent you from succumbing to...
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Scientists host 3-day snail rave
As part of an effort to understand the spread of a potentially deadly canine parasite, researchers at the University of Exeter put LEDs and glow-in-the-dark paint on 450 garden snails and proceeded to...
View ArticleComing soon: More than one data point on the transgender experience in the...
Part of the problem with the Chelsea Manning situation is that it's spawned a lot of not-terribly-well-informed discussion about the roles and experiences of transgendered people in the military....
View ArticleBeing ambidextrous could give you a cognitive advantage
In a review of scientific research on the subject of handedness and intelligence, researchers found that neither lefties nor righties came out ahead. Instead, the people with the biggest boost in...
View ArticlePsychology research is not a self-help manual
Psychology professor Jamil Zaki has a nice post explaining why the findings that come out of experimental psychology should not be taken as lessons to help you lead a better, happier, fuller life. The...
View ArticleHow one chemist does her research, even though her lab makes her sick
LuAnne McNulty is an organic chemist. A few years ago, she developed severe asthma that's triggered by ... well ... organic chemistry. Not too long ago, that biological reaction would have put her out...
View ArticlePeople who've never had leukemia show signs of immune battles that fought it off
Far more people have cells that briefly behave in cancerous ways then ever actually develop cancer. Most of the time, those cancerous cells are destroyed before they can do any real damage, and...
View ArticleSerbian researchers troll academia
The journal Metalurgia International recently published a paper entitled "Evaluation of Transformative Hermeneutic Heuristics for Processing Random Data". Though submitted by real researchers from the...
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Journal of science about kids edited by kids
This seems like it has the potential to be pretty cool. Frontiers in Neuroscience for Young Minds is a new scientific journal that will have kids — ages 8 to 18 — on the editorial review board. The...
View ArticleEpigenetics continues to be just freaking nuts
We know that stressful experiences can have negative biological repercussions — not just for the people who experience the stress, but also for their children. Now, there's some evidence that this...
View ArticlePlanetary overprotection: Have we made ourselves Mars' helicopter parents?
We've talked here before about the Office of Planetary Protection and efforts to make sure that we Earthlings don't contaminate the rest of the galaxy with our bacteria, viruses, and other assorted...
View ArticleWhat we learn about women from research vs. what we learn from evolutionary...
An interesting study on female aggression points out the trouble with making declarations about inherent human nature based on speculation about sexual dynamics. New studies, including this one, are...
View ArticleScientists unearth ancient water in Virginia
Researchers taking a core sample of sediment beneath Cape Charles, Virginia, found something surprising sandwiched between the layers of mud and ooze. Locked inside a rocky layer 5000 feet down, they...
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