There's a new antibiotic out--no big deal.

It can kill bacteria that have become immune to other antibiotics--also no big deal.

It works by disabling their ability to develop antibiotic resistance--WOHOO!!


"The drug is effective because the chemists who developed Ceftobiprole managed to outwit the bacteria at their own game, Tomasz says. The broad-spectrum antibiotic was discovered by Basilea Pharmaceuticals, based in Basel, Switzerland, and is being developed in the U.S. and worldwide by Johnson & Johnson. The research was supported by Johnson & Johnson along with a grant from the U.S. Public Health Service."


When antibiotics first arrived on the scene, the average American life expectancy jumped up by about twenty years. Sure, a few old people were living longer, but it was also largely a case of child mortality. Before antibiotics, if a kid got sick, there was basically nothing that anyone could do. (Read Angela's Ashes sometime. There were antibiotics, but the family could not afford them.) With the rise of resistant bacteria, there became this question of whether the twentieth century would be this one high-expectancy window in human history with low lifespans on either side (or at least that's what I was thinking).

Ah well. It looks as though the multidrug-resistant apocalypse just might be over before it gets going.

read more | discover8 article

And other assorted songs from "Spamalot."

Lunch turned out to be an omelette. My dragon eggs didn't exactly make it.



So I snatched this one from the abandoned section. I figure it's #@%$cked anyway:



At least my big fat stupid cat hasn't died yet!

As of this past March, thirty different research institutions have joined to become the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine (AFIRM). With $250-million in funding, they plan to expand ideas like the pixie dust limb regrowth method and a tissue-inked printer that can build whole organs (so far, its personal best is a rat heart). Most interestingly, there are plans for a handheld spritzer that would spray immature keratinocytes, skin cells, directly onto burns and wounds.

I followed a couple of links to get to this one. The New York Times linked to blogs that wrote articles based on this one in Popular Science, but focusing on just the burn sprayer, which they've nicknamed the "stem cell gun." I don't think they quite understand that keratinocytes aren't stem cells, let alone embryonic stem cells. There's no political debate here and definitely no need to start one.

read more | discover8 article

Some good news to start the week: A team at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle has cured melanoma in one patient.

Nine patients took part. Some T-cells were extracted from each patient and then grown in large quantities in the lab. The articles imply that some kind of cloning was involved, but it doesn't say which. They might just mean ordinary genetically identical daughter cells. The cells were then re-injected into the patients.

One fifty-two year-old man, identified as "patient 4," saw a complete reversal of his stage IV melanoma. It has been two years and he is still disease-free.*

The problem? The man received a massive dose of about five BILLION cells. His fellow patients who received lower doses than that saw no change in their disease. Some of the others who had the same dose as patient 4 saw some improvement, but weren't cured.

Still, this is an amazing move! They're calling it "adoptive immunotherapy." The findings have been written up in the New England Journal of Medicine.



*I learned in school, some years ago, that a cancer surgery is considered a success if the patient is still alive after five years. This was in history class, though, so perhaps the number is higher now.

read more | discover8 article

Holy CRUD! This move wasn't supposed to be any good!

O nerdly spirits of gel and digitry, I know your faces shine upon Iron Man, but truly Get Smart is the finest geek film of 2008!

KRAKA-DOOOM!!(is smitten)

It ...was ...wonderful! It is the most effective synthesis of comedy and action since Die Hard. Absolutely great from beginning to end. The dialogue echoed the old show, but it was so sweet and witty that it could have been written by my dad and uncles at a barbecue. The old guy gets to kick ass, the fat chick gets to kick ass, the nerds get to kick ass in a nerdly manner. They could have called this movie Everyone Gets to Kick Ass at Some Point or Other; We're Cool Like That. This is a great hamsterboy movie! And their old guy couldn't have been better if he'd been an SG1 alumnus!

And that guy who played Hiro on Heroes is in it.

Finally, mine own little minions. They're a bit young yet. Perhaps I should build some kind of chronoton machine to accelerate their growth and take over the world by which I mean lunch.



There are more than the four different kinds? Huh!

A recent computer science and behavior conference ended with the deaths of all participants during a raid of the local Alliance stronghold.

What better place to discuss computer science, really? For practicality reasons, it was a Horde-only conference. Any newb or Alliance player was required to create a new character and level up ahead of time so that older players wouldn't have to spend the whole time fending off monsters with the munchies.

They managed to fend off the griefers, but a mathematician and a linguist started fighting and then the discussion of WoW as a venue for studying human behavior could begin!

There was an issue of whether or not the WoW participants would want to reveal their real names and credentials. In the end, only three people said, "I am Spartacus."

Still, the fatalaty level was high. One newb (actually a senior editor for Science magazine) was slain by monsters almost immediately. "Not altogether different than your average academic conference in Vegas," she said.

read more | discover8 article

Time for some self esmeme!

If you are reading this, it is probably because your awesomeness levels are slightly above the national average. (Little known datum: Awesomeons are like midi-chlorions, except awesome.) Ordinarily, you protect the general population from being vaporized by the white-hot plasma of your coolness by refraining from boasting of it in public (which is also awesome of you). Well knock the filters off, baby! Post a reply describing one of the funktacular things you did (real or fictional) and I will post a response about what I did next.

I had been going to post a link to a thoughtful and hopeful article that makes fascinating links between public policy, human behavior and our current economic and environmental crises, but instead...


AWESOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOME!!

But read this part first or it won't make sense.

(tosses roses to Takahashi)

Come on, most of us have felt this way at some point: "Men/chicks suck! Why can't they make sense like chicks/men do? Sometimes I wish I could give up men/chicks and go gay it up; I bet gay chicks/men never have this problem!"

A study out of Vermont answers, "Well maybe not NEVER..."

When Vermont legalized gay marriage, psychologists jumped on the opportunity to study human relationships. Ordinarily, homosexual relationships are under more pressure from the outside than heterosexual ones because of the lack of social recognition. The article said something about a stereotype that homosexual relationships don't last. Anywho, legal marriage might not take all of that away, but it helps. About a thousand heterosexual and homosexual couples participated. The researchers looked at power sharing, arguments, egalitarianism, sex, money and what the writers of Futurama called "long boring talks about our relationship."

In general, homosexual relationships were more egalitarian. In heterosexual ones the women got a disproportionate amount of the housework and the men got a disproportionate amount of the financial responsibility. Women were more likely to start long boring talks conversations about relationship upkeep. In addition, the homosexual couples argued better. They were able to use humor and understanding to dispel the conflict and seemed to have an easier, "more automatic," time understanding the other person's point of view. Heterosexual couples, in contrast, got more physically agitated (heart rate, etc.) and stayed that way longer.

So are they saying we should all be gay? Heck no. But they did turn the results over to a the marriage counselors with a couple of highlighted sections and some of those little plastic tags.

The study also turned up a few surprises. You know that thing where a woman says she's dissatisfied and her husband responds passive-aggressively by becoming more distant instead of more loving? That's not a female thing! Same-sex couples do it too!

read more | discover8 article

Nate Liao is running around and acting like a two-year-old! There are two reasons for this 1. he is one and 2. his skin's not falling apart any more.

Nate Liao has had epidermolysis bullosa, meaning that his body lacks lacked the ability to create collagen VII, the compound that binds the skin to the body. The slightest pressure can give gave him tears and blisters. Even eating solid food can used to rip up the lining of his esophagus. The only previous treatment for this condition is to wrap the kid in bandages and hope he doesn't get an infection or skin cancer.

Now, though, Nate's siblings must go to further effort to keep him out of their stuff, for a mixture of bone marrow and umbilical cord blood stem cells has left the boy able to produce collagen VII on his own. This is the first time that marrow and cord blood stem cells have been used to treat a condition that did not directly involve the blood. His parents report that he is improving daily. One of his doctors is quoted as saying that it is time to take epidermolysis bullosa "off the incurable list."



After all these posts of "another step toward" and "mouse model" and "studies suggest that," I thought we could all use a "somebody actually cured something" to start the week.

read more | discover8 article

Wow. This article is mostly about how the adoption process has gotten longer and more complicated for Americans who are attempting international adoptions. However, it's only about halfway through that they say why: The U.S. signed a multinational treaty designed to curtail human trafficking in infants. Too many people were selling babies.

And of course, my first thought is, "Well, I guess it's a bit disreputable and overly favors rich adoptors, so they should stop it if they can, but what's really wrong with people accepting money?"

Yep, eye-opener here:

Vietnam stopped accepting adoption applications this year after an investigation by the American embassy found many cases in which mostly poor birth parents had been paid or deceived into placing their child in an orphanage.

In many cases, an embassy report said, “orphanage officials told them that the child will visit home frequently, will return home after they reach a certain age (often 11 or 12) or will send remittance payments from the United States.”

The report included the story of a birth mother who was unable to pay for her Caesarean section. She was told by the hospital that her baby had been transferred to an orphanage for lifelong treatment “for water on the brain.” The orphanage had instead placed the healthy baby up for adoption.

The answer to my question, it seems, is, "In theory, not a thing, but in practice it provides motivation for the worst sorts of crimes." It's the things that that motivates them to do. But here was the part where I think the NY Times was a bit incomplete. An American, presumably Caucasian man talks about what it's like to walk down the street with his (adopted) African kid while he and his wife wait for the bureaucracy to give them the go-ahead to go home:

“Many wealthy urban people kind of look at you funny, like, ‘What are you doing with this kid?’ In some instances they’ve said, ‘Why don’t you give that child back to the mother?’ when in fact there is no mother or father.”

See, there are some parts of Africa that do not have a concept of "orphan" the way we do here in the west. In the west, in the 1800's, if the parents died, the kids were screwed. In many African cultures in the in the 1800's, if the parents died, the kids were invariably taken in by members of their extended families. There was a huge, huge kickup decades ago when European charities tried to create orphanages for African kids. From the Europeans' perspectives, they were doing a great kindness, but from the African perspective, it was kidnapping.

Now, notice that I keep saying "in the 1800's." This is because everything from AIDS to urbanization has changed a lot of how things work in Africa. There are places where the old custom is still followed, but the death rate has made things difficult. There are places where the Western models have been adopted. It sounds to me like the child that the American couple means do adopt really doesn't have anyone else, but that doesn't mean that it occurred to them to look further than that child's nuclear family.

Some dude on OKCupid asked to see some of my writing. I think my existing repertoire might be just a little too nerdcore for the dude, so I offered to write him a little story right there. "Give me a topic," I said.

"Love!"







Not something less lame? (sigh)

( A story about love )


If that doesn't get the idea across, nothing will.

I've said it before; I'll say it again: You would NEVER see this in Nature. But what Science lacks in longevity and grace, it makes up for in awesome. In a writeup by Lauren Cahoon, Science compares a rare frog behavior to characters from Marvel Comics.

Science reports that certain African frogs of the Arthroleptidae variety have a very interesting way of repelling attackers. Researchers who picked up live frogs often found themselves scratched and bleeding, as if cut by claws ...which frogs don't have.

It turns out that, when angered, these frogs extend their sharp toe bones STRAIGHT THROUGH THEIR SKIN at their attacker and then heal up afterward using their regenerative abilities just like a certain X-man (except there's no adamantium and the frogs look like they bathe more). Researchers speculate that it also might be useful for clinging to rocks.



Hee hee hee! They shouldn't have named him Wolverine! Cutie Little Frog would have been more like it!

read more | discover8 article

I saw Prince Caspian. I haven't seen the recent LWW. I was surprised by the quality. It was lower than I'd expected. The pacing was iffy almost until the end. The writing was okay, but it could have been so much better so easily. ( To toss out an example... )

Still the tension and the "Who abandoned Narnia and made you king?" between Peter and Caspian was pretty good, and I did like what they did with Susan. But mostly, I missed ordinary Telmorenes. I liked the way they played Miras's lords, scheming but not as bad as he was, but I missed the running through the villages with the Maenads. I had particularly hoped for the part where they pick up the students in one place and the teacher in the other. Oh wait... I think that might have been in book seven. Nope, it was this one. Crumbs. And don't get me started on what they did to Reepacheep! Oh wait... they absolutely nailed Reepacheep. Non-crumbs.

In short, even with its flaws, the whole movie, every frame of it, is worth the ticket and would be even if it were far worse.

They did the scene about calling the witch back. And. It. Was. Made. Of. AWESOME.

Show me your enemies.

The article mentions salamanders, but I can't tell if they're part of the technique or just the inspiration. Anyway, here's some good news to start the morning. A U.S. soldier whose hand was mutilated in a bomb blast last year is undergoing a treatment that could help him regrow his lost finger. Ordinarily, the doctors would have sliced the arm off (It does look pretty nasty.) so that he could gain more use of it with a prosthesis; he even asked them to, but they held off. The other day, doctors basted the site of his wound with a powder made from pig tissue. The tissue acts as a scaffold that tricks the soldier's own stem cells into thinking that it's time to grow skin and tendons. The best part? They're calling it "pixie dust."

There are some risks and the results are questionable. A finger is a very complicated organ that has many different types of tissues working together. We're still a far cry from growing a diabetic patient a new pancreas, but it's a real start, and similar treatments have been effective in the past. This technique was based on a treatment in which doctors used a girl's cells to make her a new bladder, which they then implanted. And--I love being right--they're using adult stem cells, but they figured out how to do it from research that was performed on embryonic stem cells first. That tends to be how these things work.

read more | discover8 article

Here's a cheerful thought on this Memorial Day: the future that people have fought and died for might actually turn out better than the one on Star Trek: Scientists confirm that humpback whales have been making a slow and steady comeback since HB whaling was banned in the sixties.

So if we're doomed, it's a safe bet that it's NOT going to be because aliens return to Earth and cook up our oceans looking to hook up with the local buds from their last beach trip.

read more | discover8 article

The Phoenix has landed! The Phoenix has landed!

I watched the feed from the NASA control room with my dad. Earth is ten light-minutes away from Mars this time of year so 1. everything about the landing systems, from the timers running the parachute release to the RADAR sensors telling the pod how far it was off the ground had to be absolutely automated and 2. the people watching know that whatever has happened has already happened and there is nothing they can do to help. Needless to say, the announcement resulted in nerd-hugs all around.

And the song "Little Red Corvette" was running through my head the whole time.

...is actually rather amusing.



They'll last longer if you put them in the freezer? Blast! I am only twenty years too late to save little Glowy.



(snerksnerksnerksnerk!)