Bombs at the Boston marathon and explosions at a Texas fertilizer plant: compare and contrast. Terrorism vs. (probable) accident. Is Twitter getting better as a news tool? After the marathon blasts, the best of medicine leapt into action. Action at the Supreme Court on human gene patenting. The dismal (non)science: Is worldwide economic misery due to an Excel coding error?
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President Obama unveils his proposed budget. For science and medicine, there's a bit of good news, but mostly not, in this hypothetical numbers game. Down with prostate cancer screening! Down with robotic surgery, too? Scientific jargon confuses scientists. Cloning is easy. A new imaging technique makes brains transparent.
The Brain Activity Map (BAM) is now Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN). Obama proposes to spend $100 million in 2014 on developing neuroscience technologies, studying model animals, and planning for future neuroscience research. There are skeptics. The recent budget cuts are hitting both scientific research and patient care. Saint Jane Goodall has done some naughty things in her new book, but the media are reluctant to call it plagiarism.
In The Science Writers’ Handbook, 35 writers, most NASW members, and most freelancers by choice, tell how to hone writing skills, find new markets, and mind your own business. They include advice on managing family and home, while meeting deadlines.
In the 3rd edition of For God, Country and Coca-Cola, Mark Pendergrast explores controversies Coca-Cola has encountered in the past decade, including its alleged role in fostering obesity, and tells how the company reacted and retooled.
The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks goes on and on. Is consent all relative? The HeLa genome is not really Henrietta Lacks's genome. HeLa cells are not good models for human cells either. What can an anonymous public genome reveal? Journalists are also clueless about genomic ethical issues, apparently.
The new coronavirus has now killed 9 out of 15 victims. It has moved into the UK, and person-to-person transmission seems likely. Will this be a new pandemic? Is the world prepared for it? More on de-extinction: is bringing back the dead a dumb idea or really, really cool? And can the associated reproductive technologies make a lot of money?
A baby was cured, probably, of HIV infection. But this excellent event is probably not world-changing, despite the hype. Will HIV evolve to become less harmful, like feline immunodeficiency virus? TODAY, live-streaming of an all-day meeting on cloning extinct organisms: Wooly mammoth, passenger pigeon, American chestnut. Please sign the petition against Daylight Saving Time. A new roundup at Cocktail Party Physics. SciO13 videos online!
Steven Brill goes through hospital bills and finds greed. Is this the beginning of the beginning of the end of the current US health care system? The New York Times abandons its Green Blog and the Washington Post makes changes in its environmental coverage too. There's general agreement that this bodes ill. German physicists, American physicists, and the atom bomb.
Dan Fagin explores the tragic impact of toxic industrial pollution on residents of a small New Jersey seaside town. A prize-winning environmental journalist, Fagin directs the New York University Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program. "The reporting took longer than I ever imagined it could," Fagin writes, "requiring nearly 200 interviews plus extensive historical research and lots of Freedom of Information requests."
So, what is the Brain Activity Map? Herewith, some speculations and even possible answers. The emphasis seems to be on neuroscience technology that can monitor large groups of neurons simultaneously. Also: Download the Universe's birthday, more on Obamacare, the Mediterranean diet, and, best of all, free online MIT bio course taught by Eric Lander & Co..