Tabitha M. Powledge has some details about the so-called three-parent baby, created in Mexico because the procedure is not approved in the U.S.: "Calling the result a three-parent baby is quite a stretch. A mitochondrion contains only 37 genes, compared with the nucleus’s 20,000 plus. So, as Rachel Feltman observes at Speaking of Science, the little boy might be said to have 2.001 parents." Also, why measles hasn't really been eliminated from the Western Hemisphere.
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News from several fronts in the treatment of prostate cancer is summarized by Tabitha M. Powledge, including a study suggesting that more aggressive treatment isn't necessarily better: "British scientists studied more than 1,600 men for 10 years. The men had been randomized into groups that had surgery or radiation or underwent only 'active monitoring.' Most of the men survived no matter which group they belonged to." Also, evidence of prostate cancer in ancient times.
Tabitha M. Powledge reviews the reviews of Tom Wolfe's book on evolution and human language: "I don’t know what he believes about evolution, and don’t much care. His anti-evolution stance seems to me a marketing ploy, pure and simple. The New Journalists have always been skilled self-promoters, none more so than Wolfe. He has crafted a magnificent career out of being serially outrageous." Also, the EurekAlert hack and a humorous take on Hillary Clinton’s pneumonia.
Hungarian researchers studied how dogs respond to human speech and found that they might understand some of it, Tabitha M. Powledge writes: "I hope neuroscientists will be looking for similar capacities in the brains of other mammals. That means, though, that they will have to figure out how to get the mammal species under study to lie quietly in the clanging intimidation of an MRI machine for several minutes." Also, how journalists contribute to physics misperceptions.
News arrived last week that the nearest neighbor to our Sun, the red dwarf Proxima Centauri, is orbited by a rocky planet that might have liquid water. But Tabitha M. Powledge warns that you might not like to live there: "Proxima b is semi-sorta Earth size, minimum 1.3 Earth’s mass, and probably rocky like Earth. But in almost every other way, Proxima b cannot reasonably be called Earthlike. For example, the planet’s year is only a little more than 11 Earth days long."
The Drug Enforcement Administration acted this week to ease limits on medical marijuana research, but Tabitha M. Powledge writes that the change won't mean much: "That’s because the DEA continues to keep cannabis thoroughly illegal and classify it as a Schedule I drug … Schedule I drugs include heroin and LSD, and researchers must apply to DEA (and the state where the research is to be conducted) for a license to work with them." Also, Trump, Clinton, and mental health.
Great story, if true, as the old newsroom saying goes. Tabitha M. Powledge writes about a physics breakthrough that fizzled: "It was, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider acknowledged, statistical noise. So the Standard Model of physics remains intact. I confess to being somewhat relieved that, in this dizzying year, some widely accepted picture of our world still stands." Also, "a burgeoning controversy over a new form of gene-editing, with a protein called NgAgo."
News of the first U.S. home-grown Zika outbreak is alarming, Tabitha M. Powledge writes: "The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued its first-ever travel advisory in the United States. It says pregnant women (and women planning conception or who might be pregnant) should stay out of a one-square-mile neighborhood in Miami that seems to be an infection hotspot for the Zika virus." Also, gene-doping at the Olympics? And brain training for dementia?
Tabitha M. Powledge writes about an update on Siddhartha Mukherjee’s epigenetics story, some evidence that a common ancestor of all life on earth lived in geothermal vents, gene doping at the Olympics, and a new Pew study on views about gene editing that yielded surprising news: "A speculation: there is less fear about genetic enhancements because they have been discussed publicly for decades. Brain chips and synthetic blood are much newer ideas. They also don’t exist."
The odds are pretty long that Melania Trump's speech wasn't plagiarized, Tabitha M. Powledge writes, but does the rest of the world even care about that? "The Melania/Michelle event spawned posts arguing that copying the work of others is no big deal in many countries, and sometimes even encouraged. The idea that appropriating the words and work of others is sinful is a recent and specifically American invention." Also, norovirus afflicts the RNC California delegation.