Slanted Science

Archive for October, 2009

America’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued warnings about a recent upswing in the numbers of fake products being marketed as cures for, or preventative measures against, the H1N1 virus (responsible for what has become known as Swine Flu).
Generally marketed over the internet, the very best thing these products can be is useless. The worst they can be, of course, is lethal.

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Published online today in the journal Proceedings of The Royal Society B (Biological Sciences), is a paper which describes fossils of a new kind of flying dinosaur, or pterosaur.
Chronologically, the creature falls between two known stepping stones of pterosaur evolution.
Morphologically, however, the fossils are somewhat surprising, and seem to provide evidence to support the ‘Modular Evolution‘ theory.

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Well, it’s been a busy week for scientists looking into how like humans macaque monkeys are. Just a few days after we were told that monkey mothers ‘baby’ their children in the same way human moms do, scientists have just described research showing that they are also vaguely disturbed by computer-generated depictions of other monkeys. Read the rest of this entry »

What turns a normal cell into a cancer-causing cell? Well, the cell must lose control over its replication machinery, and this almost always happens in one or both of two ways: the genes which tell a cell to divide can develop mutations and become permanently switched on; or the genes which stop a cell from dividing develop mutations and become permanently switched off.
Genes in the first group – those which drive a cell to divide inappropriately – are called oncogenes, and scientists are reporting that they have discovered an oncogene which causes a nasty form of head/neck glandular cancer.

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Work just published in the journal Science – a member of the world’s top tier of scientific publications – suggests that a virus associated with aggressive prostate cancer may also be involved in the disease known as ME. Read the rest of this entry »

New research out of Italy suggests that female rhesus macaque monkeys treat their babies just like humans do: kissing, intense eye contact, raised voice pitch and more. As well as being fascinating and more than a bit cute, will this bring anything to the ethical debate concerning how we treat primates in both captivity and research?

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Get ready, space fans, for what should be an amazing display early on Friday morning (7.30am, US Eastern Time). NASA – in a bid to answer the old question of whether the moon contains any water – will be piledriving a rocket into the lunar surface. Read the rest of this entry »

To all our Peruvian readers: be on the lookout for someone offering you a human lung. Reporting them could net you $2000. That’s the reward on offer for anyone returning (’anonymously’) a lung which was stolen from one of those travelling anatomy shows recently. Read the rest of this entry »

This year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry have been announced: they’re Venkatraman Ramarkrishnan (Cambridge, UK); Thomas A. Steitz (Yale, USA); and Ada E. Yonath ( Rehovot, Israel). The three have been honored for their work (carried out independentlyfrom each other) into deciphering the 3-D molecular structure of ribosomes. They’re pictured above (photo from Reuters). Read the rest of this entry »

There is no greater prize in science. Keep your Albert Einstein World Award of Science. Pfft to your National Medal of Science. And spfff to your Arkansas State Fair Best Cow (Milkers Class). The one they’re all out there to win is The Nobel Prize. And this year’s winners in the field of medicine have just been announced: Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak. Congrats to them all, and let’s have a look at what got them there. Read the rest of this entry »